In Portogallo la dittatura salazarista si è insinuata nel paese, mentre nella vicina Spagna dilaga la Guerra Civile e in Italia è al potere Mussolini. Pereira, un vecchio giornalista mite e grasso, vorrebbe ignorare tutto ciò, per occuparsi solo dei libri che ama. Spiato dalla sua portinaia, si accontenta di prestare orecchio alle notizie che gli propina il cameriere Manuel. Finché l'incontro con due giovani "sovversivi", Monteiro e Marta, lo mette di fronte all'incalzare della drammatica realtà.

Estado de Excepção is a documentary about CITAC (Coimbra Theater Initiation Circle), a university theater group, revealing history since it was constituted in 1956 until the aftermath of the 1974 revolution. It is the history of the theater group university and, through it, the history of theater in Portugal, revealing two remarkable decades of the History of Portugal. Through the Academy of Coimbra, the documentary reproduces student life, the position of women in society, and the change in mentalities of being and being in the world. It reproduces the existing censorship and the fight against the dictatorship, the resistance to an exhausted regime, as well as the emerging contradictions of the democratic revolution. CITAC has a heritage of 50 years of experience in Coimbra. It carries with it the possibility of the theatrical and civic formation of thinking bodies, constituting a proper ball of a possible model, generation by generation, between studies, theater, and social drama.

A hundred letters written by Portuguese women during the Salazar dictatorship were found by chance in a second-hand bookshop. By confronting today the women who wrote these letters with the ghosts of the past, and revealing important archive material, Letters to a Dictatorship takes us on an in-depth journey through the obscurantism that dominated Portugal for more than 50 years.