About Candelaria Pictures
Our Mission
Candelaria Pictures is an independent film company rooted in heritage, craftsmanship, and enduring storytelling.
The name comes from Candelária, a parish on the western coast of Pico Island in the Azores — a place of black volcanic stone, Atlantic wind, and generational resilience. In Portuguese tradition, Candelária evokes light — from “candle” — a symbol of guidance through darkness. It represents clarity, faith, and quiet strength.
That is the foundation of the company.
About O AÇORIANO
Feature Film Synopsis
Set against the breathtaking and interconnected landscapes of the Azorean archipelago, O Açoriano follows Aryton, a charismatic chef and entrepreneur whose life is defined by motion — between islands, relationships, and carefully kept secrets. Aryton owns five thriving restaurants across five different islands, all named O Açoriano and just as unknowingly, he has built five deeply personal relationships with five women, all named Maria — each one believing she is the only woman in his life.
When each Maria discovers she is pregnant, Aryton’s meticulously balanced world begins to fracture. Faced with the impossible task of keeping the truth from colliding, he enlists the help of his lifelong friends — a pilot, a ferry captain, a police officer, a café owner, and a quiet logistics mastermind — whose island-wide knowledge turns ferry schedules, flight plans, harbors, cafés, and hospital corridors into an elaborate choreography of near-misses and misdirection. Adding to the chaos is a chorus of sharp-tongued widows whose watchful eyes and relentless gossip ensure that nothing on the islands goes unnoticed for long.
As the pregnancies advance and the margins for error disappear, Aryton’s deception becomes increasingly unsustainable. The physical juggling across the islands mirrors a deeper emotional reckoning he can no longer avoid: the unresolved absence of his own father, a man who fled responsibility and left behind a legacy of silence that Aryton has unknowingly repeated in his own life. Haunted by this inheritance, Aryton is forced to confront the difference between freedom and avoidance, love and possession, presence and escape.
ABOUT CASA
Feature Film Synopsis
When a top-tier crew of contractors begins renovating a 225-year-old brownstone in a historic city core, they uncover a terrifying truth: the house is inhabited by mutated spirits of former residents and tradespeople, bound to the structure by centuries of unfinished labor and ritual sacrifice. As the renovation progresses, the house turns hostile, manifesting creatures made of stone, wood, glass, plaster, and steel that seek to replace the living. Trapped inside and cut off from help, the crew must rely on their skills and tools to survive, turning the renovation itself into a fight for their lives—while racing to finish the job before the house claims them forever.
About Basti builds
TV Series Synopsis
Basti Builds is an animated educational adventure series for children ages 5–11 that follows Basti, a curious bear cub, as he tags along with his Papa Bear, a skilled general contractor, to learn how the world is built. From foundations and framing to tools, teamwork, and problem-solving, each episode introduces young viewers to real construction trades through playful storytelling and hands-on discovery.
Guided by mentorship, curiosity, and a love of creating, Basti meets a colorful cast of animal tradespeople who show that building isn’t just about structures—it’s about collaboration, creativity, and pride in doing meaningful work. Designed to entertain first and educate naturally, Basti Builds inspires kids to explore, ask questions, and see the trades as an exciting path where imagination meets real-world skills.
About the trades
TV Series Synopsis
Yellowstone meets The Sopranos, set not on the frontier or the East Coast, but inside the brutal, billion-dollar empire of modern construction.
In a city being reshaped by cranes and concrete, one family builds the skyline—and buries the bodies.
The Trades is a one-hour prestige drama that tears open the steel-framed skeleton of North America’s booming construction industry to expose the power, corruption, and violence holding it together. At the center is Antonio Zeferino, a ruthless patriarch whose empire was built from nothing and now towers over the city he helped create. To the public, Antonio is a self-made success story. To those who know him, he is something far more dangerous.
Antonio runs The Zeferino Group, the largest construction and land development company on the continent. Their projects shape neighborhoods, influence elections, and move billions in capital. But behind polished boardrooms and ceremonial groundbreakings lie sabotage, shell companies, buried bribes, and problems that don’t stay problems for long.
As rival developers, criminal syndicates, union bosses, and corrupt politicians close in, the greatest threat to Antonio’s empire may come from within. His sons fight for control. His daughter questions the cost of loyalty. His wife keeps the family together while quietly protecting secrets of her own. Every new project brings higher stakes—and the growing risk that the foundation itself may crack.
Set across high-rise job sites, political backrooms, union halls, and the Zeferino family’s fortified estate, The Trades explores legacy, power, and the weaponization of loyalty in a world where progress is ruthless and success is never clean.
This is a story about the business of building—and the brutal truth that nothing rises without something being destroyed first. Because in this world, to a hammer, every problem is a nail.
About the race
Short Film Synopsis
When two young brothers — eight-year-old Aryton and his older brother Nigel — are left alone in a towering architect’s boardroom overlooking downtown Toronto, boredom quickly transforms into adventure.
Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass and a meticulously crafted scale model of the city, the boys discover something irresistible: an entire miniature Toronto waiting to be conquered. Armed with nothing more than two Hot Wheels cars and the boundless intensity of sibling rivalry, they turn the quiet boardroom into a high-stakes racetrack.
What begins as harmless competition escalates into an epic battle of strategy and speed. Fingers become drivers. Model streets become highways. The CN Tower — both outside the window and replicated in miniature — stands as the ultimate landmark in their imagined world.
But when a reckless maneuver snaps the model CN Tower in half, something impossible happens.
A deep rumble shakes the glass walls.
Outside the boardroom window, the real CN Tower begins to crack.
As their playful race bleeds into reality, the brothers are forced to confront a terrifying possibility: their imagination may not be pretend. With the skyline collapsing before their eyes, panic replaces pride, and the boys scramble to undo what they’ve done — frantically trying to piece the miniature tower back together in hopes of saving the real one.
In a final breathless moment, the world hangs in balance between play and consequence.
The Race is a visually charged, high-concept short film about brotherhood, rivalry, guilt, and the thin line between imagination and reality. It captures the epic scale of childhood play — and asks what happens when imagination is powerful enough to change the world.
about the amabel letters
Feature Film Synopsis
When Hayley, a guarded young woman in Toronto, purchases a refurbished dresser from a charming street market, she believes she’s simply buying furniture for a fresh start. Instead, she uncovers a hidden bundle of handwritten love letters tucked deep inside a drawer — letters exchanged just a decade earlier between two passionate lovers, Amabel and Joshan.
As Hayley begins reading, she is swept into a romance that feels immediate and unfinished. The couple’s words are vivid, intimate, and filled with plans for a future that, somehow, never came to be. The final letters hint at heartbreak, sacrifice, and a sudden disappearance that leaves more questions than answers.
Unable to ignore the pull of their story, Hayley becomes determined to discover what happened. With the help of her outspoken mother, loyal friends, and her ever-curious dog, Tessy, she retraces the couple’s steps through Toronto’s familiar cafés, parks, and quiet corners — places that still seem to echo with their love.
But the deeper Hayley digs, the more personal the mystery becomes. The letters begin to mirror her own fears about vulnerability and loss. As she uncovers the truth behind Amabel and Joshan’s fate, Hayley must confront the walls she has built around her own heart.
The Amabel Letters is a romantic mystery about destiny, second chances, and the unexpected ways love connects us across time — reminding us that sometimes the story we’re chasing is the one that leads us back to ourselves.
About the last brick
Feature Film Synopsis
In the late 1980s, Francisco and Maria arrive in Montreal from Europe with their five young daughters and little more than hope. When customs officers discover a single brick in their luggage, Maria explains in broken English that her husband is a mason, coming to Canada to build a better life. After seeing the calloused proof in his hands, they are allowed in.
Francisco works tirelessly as a bricklayer, quietly enduring coworkers who boast about sons who will inherit their trades. He has only daughters—except the youngest, Sofia, is determined to follow him into the male-dominated world of construction. Though reluctant at first, Francisco watches as Sofia proves herself, transforming his small masonry business into a thriving construction company.
Years later, as Sofia builds her own family home, Francisco insists on laying the bricks himself. In the film’s final, tender moment, Sofia hands her aging father the last brick to set in place—symbolizing legacy, acceptance, and the realization that the greatest heir he ever needed was his daughter.
The Last Brick is a heartfelt immigrant story about family, pride, and the enduring bonds built one generation at a time.
About tradies
Feature Film Synopsis
TRADIES is a high-stakes crime thriller about a crew everyone trusts — because no one ever looks twice at the people who build the world around them.
By day, Tradie and his elite crew — Chippy, Sparky, Brickie, Plumbo, Fridgie, Boilie, and Tiler — are the most respected tradespeople in the city, constructing luxury condos, private vaults, banks, and tech headquarters. They’re professional, disciplined, and invisible in plain sight.
By night, they exploit something no criminal ever has: total control over a building before it exists.
With insider access to blueprints, materials, schedules, and security systems, the crew executes flawless thefts with no alarms, no forced entry, and no evidence — just empty vaults discovered long after the dust has settled.
But when a sharp investigator begins to notice a pattern hidden in concrete pours and structural layouts, the crew’s greatest strength — their precision — becomes their greatest liability. As pressure mounts and loyalties are tested, Tradie must choose between completing the ultimate exit plan or protecting the crew he built from the ground up.
TRADIES is Heat through the lens of modern construction — a story about mastery, brotherhood, and the cost of building something too perfect to last.
About put your life on it
Feature Film Synopsis
A 57-year-old master builder — a general contractor who has spent his entire life shaping homes, shaping crews, and shaping men.
As he prepares to complete what he quietly knows will be his final custom home, Antonio moves through the project with unusual reflection. Surrounded by a diverse crew of tradespeople from around the world — demolition experts, framers, bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, and finish carpenters — the jobsite hums with banter, pride, and the unfiltered language of the trades. It’s rough.
When an unexpected discovery during demolition reveals a litter of abandoned puppies, his instinct to protect life — even in the middle of destruction — reminds everyone why he leads the way he does. One of those puppies, Zoey, becomes his constant companion.
As the house nears completion, Antonio and his partner Serena walk through the finished space for the first time.
Unable to stay away from the rhythm of the jobsite, he returns one last time to be among his crew — to hear the machines, smell the lumber, feel the dirt under his boots. But in the middle of the controlled chaos he’s mastered for decades, he collapses.
What follows is a citywide tribute unlike any other — a procession of cranes, dump trucks, concrete mixers, and tradespeople in black hardhats honoring a man who built their livelihoods and earned their respect. From Toronto’s skyline to the volcanic peak of Pico Mountain in the Azores, his final journey becomes a meditation on craft, mortality, and what it truly means to leave something behind.
Put Your Life On It is a cinematic love letter to the 220 million construction workers worldwide — a story about dignity in labor, loyalty among trades, and the quiet heroes who build the world but rarely stand in the spotlight.
Connect with Us
