Cebaldo, an indigenous Dule from Panama works as a fishermen’s assistant in a town in northern Portugal. He suffers from nostalgia, and in his loneliness memories take him away from his daily routine, immersing him in a journey back to his village in Guna Yala, where a botanical doctor confronts him with the impossibility of returning to the past.
Three young men–two brothers and their cousin–meet on a dense summer night to feel the ‘high’ of a dozen hasiklidika songs: rebetiko songs from the beginning of the 20th century that celebrate the effects of hashish. But beyond the pleasures of drugs, it is a question of love, of joy and sadness, a search for freedom and political commitment… Little by little, yesterday’s counterculture, made out of poverty and violence, and built on the pains of exile, reverberates the one of today.
Deep inside the Argentinian highlands in a small community at an altitude of 4000 meters, a native llama herder is following the traces of an invisible puma who is killing his livestock. Through his search, a mystical exchange is revealed between him, his ancestors and the changing form of the puma.
Every six years, the Sokol movement—a social organisation founded 150 years ago—organises a mass gymnastic performance in a football stadium. People from all over the world travel to Prague for this show. The film focusses on two characters as they prepare for the big event. Radek is an awkward young man whose family has been part of the Sokol movement for many generations. He is a gymnast who trains for the most difficult part of the performance. The second protagonist is the 75-year-old trainer, Mirek. Sokol is his life, and he wants to make everything perfectly. The big day is rapidly approaching.
After a few months at Aldeia Verde (Ladainha, Minas Gerais), the yãmiyhex (spirit-women) get ready to leave. Sueli and Isael Maxakali record the preparations and the great farewell party. During the days of celebration, a crowd of spirits cross the village. The yãmiyhex leave, but they always come back missing their fathers and mothers.
Rocks of four colours compose the landscape of Menorca. A route from the darkest to the lightest of the rocks will guide the film-maker on a journey back to his native land: an island that is sinking, inhabited by his younger brother, who has decided to remain there.
An Amazonian story of a rebel love that breaks the moral and cultural boundaries of the time, told by Dona Piti, daughter of Chico Coló, a ‘rubber soldier’, and by Antônio, an Ashaninka from Peru.
22 OCT / 21:30 / Culturgest / 114’
Travelling by boat along the deep Amazon forest, a Portuguese director searches for a language that was imposed upon the Indians by his ancestors. Through this mixed language, Nheengatu, and by sharing the shooting with the local population, the film takes shape as these two worlds come together.
23 OCT / 21:00 / Culturgest / 112’
This is the story of a man going to the very end of Siberia. He experienced love in Paris ten years ago, but lost it. Will this frozen landscape and its inhabitants bring it back to him? He’ll ask men and women living in those Siberian villages to tell him their own experience of love. They are the people who know disaster, cold and alcohol. Those who also say “My love”.
24 OCT / 16:00 / Culturgest / 157’
An afternoon with musician, composer, poet, sociologist and thinker Negro Leo. He articulates his ideas about the development of music, as well as Brazilian and international politics, the rise of neo-Pentecostal religions and his obsession with social media, all the while making a parallel with his own life.
24 OCT / 21:30 / Culturgest / 104’
25 OCT / 16:00 / Culturgest / 60’
Shot between 2016 and 2019, Chelas nha kau reveals different aspects of what it means to be young in a social housing project and presents a group of friends for whom “Chelas is the capital of Lisbon and Lisbon is the capital of Portugal.” Chelas City is a rap song by Bataclan 1950, a collective of youngsters that allow us to enter their world with their rhymes.
25 OCT / 19:00 / Culturgest / 73’
Stanley Kubrick’s mark on the legacy of cinema can never be measured. He was a giant in his field, his great works resembling pristine pieces of art, studied by students and masters alike, all searching for answers their maker was notoriously reticent to give. While he’s among the most scrutinized film-makers that ever lived, the chance to hear Kubrick’s own words was a rarity—until now.
The spaces we navigate are organised according to the idea of intimacy. We move based on proximity, keeping a constant relational metric between different private spheres and the interstice between them.
The closest intimacy unit, ‘me’, is in an ongoing relation with the other, be it a person or a landscape. One projects memories and emotions onto the sea or the mountains. Or strangers start a relationship in a city that is also strange. Sometimes even with the very city and its catacombs. Or one revisits a place that was once familiar, but is now absolutely unrecognisable. Pain, loss, love and desire may also reach the other in a sharing gesture, establishing bridges and somewhat easing loneliness.
Family—a core of intimate relations constantly negotiating proximity and imbued with their own codes—is scrutinised from different points of view.
The home or the homeland, places circumscribing and determining identities, are interchangeable notions in someone’s life. Where do we belong? What belongs to us?
In this way we explore the ongoing tension between exterior and interior, the juxtaposition of private lives and public narratives.
“The first step of melomania is a tantrum” is the thought process that reveals the correlations between music, harmony, melody, timbre and culture. The journey that begins in a musical home and leads someone to continuously live inspired by music.
A mind-blowing journey through Paris: in Underneath, we travel the underground tunnels and sewers through the inner arteries of the city guided by those who make this place theirs; in This Is Paris Too, Lech Kowalski’s camera-body travels the poorest areas of Paris next to a North-American native, the areas of the refugees and homeless people with whom they talk.
The film bears witness to the last daily routines in the Aleixo housing project, which exude tension given the coerced fate. Between the fall of the first and last towers, the demolition process drags on for years, leaving the lives of its inhabitants hanging. Obliged to accept the end of their community, they helplessly watch their past being disfigured.
In an unfinished house, the reading of its Descriptive Memory and the collection of documents about its construction process awaken fragments of uncertain memories. Lynne Sachs filmed her father, a bon vivant and successful businessman, between 1984 and 2019. Film About a Father Who attempts to understand what connects a family beyond the surface.
On December 13, 1968, the Brazilian military dictatorship passed Institutional Act Number Five, which marked the start of the most repressive and violent phase of the regime. Two weeks later, singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso was arrested. Fifty years later, he paints an intimate, detailed portrait of his days in solitary, recalls and performs songs that marked the period of his incarceration, and revisits painful incidents. Caetano also presents new information produced by the dictatorship about the reasons for his detainment, shedding light on the arbitrary brutality of that time in Brazilian history.
A video camera captures fleeting moments. as sombras e os seus nomes is based on texts by Walter Benjamin and reflects upon the relation between images, names and knowledge. In The Missing One, the camera is also what brings closer. After years apart, Rareş Ienasoaie makes this film to once again get to know his older sister, isolated by her morphine addiction.
Two films based on the ghosts inhabiting the landscape. In O que não se vê, Paulo Abreu goes back to footage from a cancelled project and finds a narrative on friendship and cinema. Northern Range displays the transformations on the French coast between Dunkirk and Calais, given that time erases what people build.
An intimate approach to the experience of Alzheimer’s disease in a 95-year-old woman and her relationship with her immediate surroundings. The tension between lucidity and dementia will shape a new notion of personhood, able to live and perceive the world in another way.
Two Syrian refugees from two different wars rebuild their home. In Quneitra 74, Mohammad Malas follows a woman who returns to her house—destroyed in the meantime—in a mute cry for the right to a place. In Gevar’s Land, 46 years after and thousands of miles away, in a community garden in France, hope is reborn despite the drought.
“Silence is a personal, intimate and a kind of a diary film. It’s a passionate creed for life, love and cinematography. A woman meets a man in different places, different times and in different moods. A film for meditation.” – Michael Pilz
We propose to bring together several industry players for a discussion that will provide an overview of what it means to produce films in Portugal nowadays. Based on the notion of a consistent past and a living present, what future will Portuguese film production bring?
A Vida em Comum follows a period in the life of Poeta and Belinha, a couple of Cape Verdean origin who lives in a community scheduled to be dismantled: the neighbourhood of Barruncho, in Odivelas. Uncertain about the future, Poeta and Belinha take care of their animals and crops, and adjust to the daily changes.
Feeling finds form in three tales of being together, apart. Bohdanowicz’s memorial to a lost friend navigates signs, artworks and memories with choreographic candour. Prologue’s two young dancers perform a pas de deux with their respective futures before the camera’s intense gaze. Episodes – Spring 2018 constructs its cast’s exchanges into a searching, vital cinema, offering a loose group portrait of complicities and distance, bodies and minds.
As moving image, cinema is capable of delivering impermanence as nothing else. The screen conveys a series of moments set in time as a whole in constant change. From that movement emerges the dream, the idea, which in turn feeds the image, turning each film into an impossible machine of perpetual motion. Cinema is in itself impermanent, and so it is the perfect tool to capture the state of continuous transition experienced by the world and the individuals.
In This Day Won’t Last, Mouaad el Salem says he expects next year to be better than this one, that a young man can be an elderly woman, and that a nightmare can also be a dream. This programme brings together several films questioning just how strong are the notions of identity, space and time, either by personal turmoil, such as in Beynimdəki Mismarlar, or by socio-political advances, like in Aphasia.
We change ourselves, transform who we are, looking to being honest with ourselves and adjusting to expectations coming from others. And we travel in search of our origins in order to have a better understanding of where we’re headed.
Time units, such as seasons or years, help us find meaning in that movement in a childish attempt to control the future. We’re also always moving in relation to others, questioning our place. But most importantly, any place is circumstantial, no matter if it is inside or outside of us.
Establishing connections between Belgian colonialism, Austrian anti-Semitism and the war in Yugoslavia, Aphasia struggles with the difficulty of collectively discussing traumatic moments in our history. In Ubundu, the director chants the colonial traits of the existence of an ocapi in the Antwerp Zoo.
A young man wanders through the ruins of what may or may not be his childhood home, where each crumbling doorway opens up to the past. No matter how much he has tried to change, the young man always returns to the same places, same questions, same faces, same recollections—the same nails in his brain.
Director Vladimir Léon brings his brother Pierre an old suitcase he had taken from their mother’s house after she died. Inside, they find documents relating their Russian grandparents to the Soviet Intelligence in Paris before WWII. From Paris to Russia, the brothers wander among the ruins of lost worlds and unspoken stories. They talk, they sing, they drink, they meet lots of people, friends, witnesses, historians, uncovering counter-espionage reports, Soviet daily life testimonies, Gulag memories… The fears of the remote past reappear like ghosts and seem closer to us than expected.
In Carbón, Nivardo and Ismael are 70 years old and survive making coal. Night after night, the two friends take part in a transformation process hidden behind the thick smoke. Field explores the relation between a plot of land and the two brothers working on it. As the seasons go by, they guide us through work and memory, questioning the present and the future.
One home is on fire. All homes. One trip turns into several and this is one with no return. Many women talk. They tell their stories. The loss, death and struggle of being, alongside others.
Navigating, becoming, transforming. Choices, dreams, desires – from a game of ‘would you rather’ to the existential dilemma of the future. A film constructed through playful call and response. Lives unfolding over a listless Russian summer. A long night with a young artist, swimming in cliquey waters armed with aspiration, cynicism and digital nous. A fork in a young adult’s life, whose future demands a contemplation of his sense of self.
Making a Living in the Dry Season is an intimate portrait of a family living off agriculture and shepherding in Namibe, Angola. In virar mar / meer werden, water is a physical and metaphysical metaphor for human existence. Between the Brazilian Sertão and the swamps from Dithmarschen (Northern Germany), one watches everyday tragedies in times of climate changes.
– In partnership with Goethe Institut
In this session, the eye of the film-makers meditates on landscape, human intervention and poetry. Luciana Fina filmed during confinement, questioning the Alentejo landscape under threat. In A Man Leaning, the film-making duo pays a visit to the places where Thierry Metz—who committed suicide in 1997—lived, tracking his poetry in south-western France.
8 NOV / 20:00 / Cinema Ideal / 73’
4 confrontational films: in This Day Won’t Last, a queer boy in Tunisia maps the spaces of resistance that enable survival; in Language, not territory, women from different places in the world tell us about being raised under capitalism; in Trópico de Capricórnio, transexual prostitutes from São Paulo express desires before the camera that draw other worlds; in the final clash, Antelopes, them and us against surveillance tools.
Two films questioning the way we inhabit the world. Without leaving home, A Resistência Íntima looks at objects and gestures that are as mysterious as they are trite. Daniel Kötter, in turn, travels to the periphery of Addis Ababa, which is undergoing transformation as rural areas are being flattened to build new boroughs for both rich and poor.
Places become sets for the unfolding of lives in a quartet of films that float between intimacy and distance, hybridising curiosity and freedom in structure and subject. Brothers navigate an urban landscape; a melange of characters and a talking dog exist between seven cities, karaoke and the apocalypse; teens test and build bonds during downtime; a displaced narrator searches for signs and symbols, as she travels across lands that once were ocean.
Portraits of couples, friends, families and pets and their owners. They share the intimacy of daily life, habits, beliefs, tastes and even some physical traits. Based on their faces and the choreography of their gestures, we unveil the story that binds them, evoking Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium: “Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one.”
Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his book Silencing the Past (1995), questions the way in which power produces historical narratives. Trouillot argues that unequal power structures succeed in creating and strengthening narratives that hold several silences. Those silences can be found not only in the outcome of scholar research on history, but also in the very sources, in the archives and in the way societies remember the past, establish historical meanings and tell their (hi)stories.
A white light washes over the images of Anunciaron tormenta, and we partially close our eyes. It is an automatic gesture we use to see better, because all of a sudden we’re exposed to something for which we weren’t prepared, and thus we adjust, opening ourselves to reread our assumptions. This programme is built based on a network of films that bring light to the darkest corners of history—of a country, culture or person. They work on a number of materials, family archives, found footage, diaries or artistic writings, handled from different social and political points of view, focussing on identity and memory issues. Always concerning the future those histories shape.
A Morte Branca do Feiticeiro Negro is a visual poetic essay, an intimate and sensory journey reflecting on the silencing and invisibility of Black people in diaspora. A Storm Was Coming confronts and questions the surviving archives documenting the mysterious death of Ësáasi Eweera, the last Bubi leader in the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea.
Moderator Joana Sousa (Doclisboa Director)
The story of a dystopian society of ten Numbers stuck in daily routines regulated by strict rules set out by an omnipresent deity, the Great Zero, and enforced by armed Judges. In this strictly ordered world an error occurred causing the creation of a new world. Will it be any better than the old one?
Moderator Miguel Ribeiro (Doclisboa Director)
Mexico, March 2015. Carmen Aristegui, incorruptible journalist, is fired from the radio station where she has worked for years. But Carmen continues her battle: raising awareness and fighting against misinformation. The film tells the story of this quest, which is difficult and dangerous, but essential to the health of democracy. A story in which resistance becomes a form of survival.
Moderator Ana Pereira (Doclisboa)
A documentary essay composed entirely of archive photographs and documents of the first big massacre of Jews in Romania: in the city of Iași, on June 29, 1941, more than 10.000 were killed—first by bullets, then by asphyxiation in freight trains. In the first part of the film, photographs of the people who were eventually killed by the Romanian army and by civilians are accompanied by voices who recite the documents related to their fate in the massacre. The second part is a montage of the remaining photographs of the actual massacre (taken mostly by the German soldiers who were in town).
Moderator Joana Sousa (Doclisboa Director) e Paulo Catrica (Instituto de História Contemporânea - FCSH-UNL)
For two decades, the victims of the Six-Day War in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been fighting in Kisangani for the recognition of this bloody conflict and demanding compensation. Tired of unsuccessful pleas, they have finally decided to voice their claims in Kinshasa, after a long journey down the Congo River.
Moderator Amarante Abramovici (Doclisboa Programmer)
An archaeologist and a weapons designer meet in the Negev Desert and begin discussing love and war. The film then proceeds with changing actors in changing roles—a round dance that takes us to the cities of Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong and São Paulo. The characters include: an old artist who meets his younger self; a mother who lives with her two grown sons (a priest and a policeman); a Chinese woman and a Japanese woman; a curator and a cosmologist. Their dialogues deal with now obsolete social taboos, generational conflict, war guilt and cosmological musings.
Moderator Justin Jaeckle
Mohammad Malas, a great Syrian film-maker, tells us about his life journey marked by consecutive wars in Unlocking Doors of Cinema. Documentary and fiction cross and contaminate one another in his films. In The Dream, Malas asks Palestinian refugees to describe their dreams. The Sabra and Shatila massacre halts the project, which was only completed in 1987.
Moderator Tomás Baltazar (Doclisboa Programmer)
Cinema entails an archival impulse. Given that it is impossible to deal with the present or the future without relating to the past, and that the past is constantly under construction, we’ve outlined a programme featuring films that not only deal with different archive materials, but are themselves independent and dynamic archives. By producing their own images, narratives, testimonies and even political and social actions, these are films that open themselves to future rediscovery and rereading.
The programme is made of gestures that crystallise moments: the first democratic change in government in Burkina Faso in Après ta révolte ton vote; the uprising of a generation under the yoke of dictatorship in Antena da Raça; the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea by a boat of refugees in Purple Sea; or the brief instants of intimacy in With Love – Volume One 1987-1996.
These films multiply into a number of identities—document, proof, memory, record—in a continuous archaeology of the present, in a struggle against oblivion, questioning the past and the future.
The film appropriates and discusses Brazilian reality based on dialogues, excerpts and scenes from Glauber Rocha’s visceral films and his desire to “remove the masks” from Brazil’s third world saga. The clear-sighted madness of Glauber’s tales is on the streets and in politics, and the people of today feature in the reverse shot of the characters in his films.
Moderator Joana Sousa (Doclisboa Director) and Giulia Strippoli (Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA FCSH)
In Burkina Faso, Simplice Ganou makes his films based on human relations, but in Switzerland the greatest challenge is to establish them. In The Filmmaker’s House two English builders remove the fence that separates the director’s house from his Pakistani neighbour, while a Slovenian homeless man tries to convince the Colombian house maid to let him take shelter there.
Moderator Tomás Baltazar (Doclisboa Programmer)
The Huerta of Valencia is a privileged spot of Mediterranean agriculture. It has survived to this day, yet in the last decades has undergone a process of deterioration. “The Huerta is dying”, the farmers claim. One of the last is Antonio Ramon. Camagroga follows his work and his daughter’s for a whole year. The film is an elegy of work, land, heritage and resistance.
Moderator Amarante Abramovici (Doclisboa Programmer)
Bulletproof explores the complexities of violence in schools by looking at the strategies employed to prevent it. The film observes the long-standing rituals that take place in and around American schools: homecoming parades, basketball practice, morning announcements, and math class. Unfolding alongside these scenes are a collection of newer traditions: lockdown drills, teacher firearms training, metal detector screenings, and school safety trade shows. A look beyond immediate causes and responses to mass shootings in a meditation on the array of forces that shape the culture of violence in the US.
Moderator Miguel Ribeiro (Doclisboa Director)
Following a popular uprising in October 2014, Burkina Faso commits to a historic vote. Thanks to a movement led by the young Burkina generation, this is the first time the country is witnessing a change of government via the ballot boxes.
Moderator Amarante Abramovici (Doclisboa Programmer)
According to the myth still in force in the coal towns of Patagonia, if a woman enters a mine, the earth becomes jealous. Then, there’s collapse and death. Shady River starts from a dark personal experience to become a film about the silence of women who live in men’s villages. How to film where our presence is prohibited? How to record the resonances of what doesn’t sound? As the fog and smoke from the power plant cover the town, the voices of the women of Río Turbio force their way between the white of the ice and the hum of the drilling machines, until they blow up the structure of silence.
Moderator Miguel Ribeiro (Doclisboa Director)
“I see everything,” she says, as if it was a curse. Brilliant sunshine, clear blue skies. The sea is calm. Buzzing voices. A rush of images, twirling, upside down, jolting. People in the boat, in the water, screams, life jackets, emergency whistles. Fluorescent orange. There’s no horizon any more, no sky, no up or down, only deepness and nothing to hold on to. She is filming and speaking. To him, to herself, to us, perhaps. Fuck you all! She speaks, she rages, and she films to beat being tired, being cold, the fact that help isn’t coming. To beat dying, just for something to remain.
Moderator Joana Sousa (Doclisboa Director)
There are several moments during which, be it individually or collectively, the next step urges us to declare who we are and where we come from. This programme is based on that precise moment, the moment of performing a self-assessment and knowing that henceforth nothing will be the same—or it might even be, but we will always be deeply mindful of the urge for change.
We thus summon films dealing with key moments in life: the foretaste of the complete transformation in Bea’s life during the days leading to birth in Tiempos de deseo; the weekly gatherings of a group of elderly people in Buenos Aires to read In Search of Lost Time in El tiempo perdido; or the return to Grand Opera, an Historical Romance, by James Benning, and to the obsessive search for a personal history when meeting the people and visiting the places from the past.
In the end, the feeling that those moments may not be so extraordinary, the feeling that life may be a dialogue between what brought us here and what we’ll do with it—both in those moments that leave an imprint in us and in those we’ll keep, because the camera was there to provide us with the images with which we shall keep on treading our path.
This is Vincent Meessen’s free take on La Chinoise, the 1967 film by Jean-Luc Godard, and a ‘film in progress of making itself’ in Dakar. It is conceived as a re-editing operation of Godard’s film, reallocating its roles and characters, and updating its plot. Although not alive any more, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original, now becomes the key character.
Moderator Miguel Ribeiro (Doclisboa Director) and Victor Barros (Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA FCSH)
A group of people have been gathering for the last eighteen years at a bar in Buenos Aires to read the same book over and over: In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. Going through their memories and emotions, with a great sense of humour, the group gives the novel a new and unexpected meaning.
Moderator Amarante Abramovici (Doclisboa Programmer)
Badly injured during the 1995 sarin gas terrorist attack in Tokyo’s underground system by doomsday cult Aum, the director embarks on an intimate and exacting journey with one of the cult’s executives, Hiroshi Araki, to record the parallel life paths of a victim and a perpetrator.
Moderator Joana Sousa (Doclisboa Director)
A film with found footage about a couple enjoying a beautiful day, long walks and a firearm, a blanket, food, sex and art. It references Everson’s 2007 film The Picnic.
Moderator Justin Jaeckle (Doclisboa Programmer)
Christoph Schlingensief’s films, performances, installations and provocative theatrical, television and operatic productions shaped the cultural and political discourse in Germany for two decades before his death in 2010 at just 49 years of age. This film attempts to exhaustively document the vast spectrum of this exceptional artist’s oeuvre, tracing his development from pubescent film-maker with an artistic bloodlust to revolutionary stage director in Berlin and Bayreuth, and, ultimately, to Germany’s ‘national artist’, who was purportedly venerated by all and invited to create the German Pavilion for the 2011 Venice Biennale.
Moderator Joana Sousa (Doclisboa Director)
In Homelands, Lenka visits her grandmother’s homeland, who had to leave Greec during the Greek Civil War and died recently without ever returning. Lenka was born in the former Yugoslavia, and looks for traces or resistance in people, in buildings and in the ground. Swamp, a labyrinthine game about perception, opens the session.
Moderator Miguel Ribeiro (Doclisboa Director)
Moderator Tomás Baltazar (Doclisboa Programmer)
Two films for those yet to come. Eric Pauwels presents her daughter with a film in the shape of a letter that is a personal view on the world where the infinitely small and the universal get mixed up. In Times of Desire, Raquel Marques follows the pregnancy of a friend combining intimacy and distance in a world where having a child is a choice.
Moderator Amarante Abramovici (Doclisboa Programmer)
What pasts remain in the granite of monuments? With what images can we keep the revolutions from the past alive? What violences persist in the reinvented rituals? How many possibilities and shapes has resistance? Four films that prompt us to reimagine relations with past and history, the revolutionary potential of collective memory.
Moderator Joana Sousa (Doclisboa Director)
The film weaves together a dense fabric of storylines, timelines and settings, intermingled with indigenous cosmologies, travelogues and anthropological literature. It follows a young man of indigenous origin travelling upriver through the Brazilian jungle to a village and a group of European settlers also travelling upriver, collecting, possessing and searching for a position from which they can survey the forest and the river. Some 150 years separate the two layers. An homage to the abundant greenery of the Amazon region, the woods of New England in winter and the indigenous populations of both Americas.
Moderator Miguel Ribeiro (Doclisboa Director) and Patrícia Sequeira Brás (Institute of Contemporary History - NOVA FCSH)
City government touches almost every aspect of our lives. Most of us are unaware of or take for granted these necessary services such as police, fire, sanitation, veterans affairs, elder support, parks, licensing of various professional activities, keeping records of birth, marriage and death, as well as hundreds of other activities that support residents and visitors. The film shows the efforts by Boston city government to provide these services and illustrates the variety of ways the city administration enters into civil discourse with its citizens.
When cinema turns the camera on itself. Christophe Derouet creates a personal, partial portrait of André S. Labarthe, the film-maker and critic who came up with the series Cinéastes de notre temps and who died in 2018. In that same series, we discover Jean-François Stévenin as film-maker and the story of the film that never came true.
Moderator Amarante Abramovici (Doclisboa Programmer)
“A dense curtain of snowflakes, a child painting on a fogged glass pane with its fingertips, a fleeting smile, a passing landscape, a rattling projector, a kitchen conversation with friends or naked feet walking. Video and audio footage shot by Michael Pilz between 1987 and 1996. Movements, gestures, and glances that he captured with his camera and his heart. The images reveal the nature of his subjects, but also the observer behind the camera. A radical personal experience of seeing, communicated in the form of a cinematic love letter — to life and to those who have shared part of the journey. – Michelle Koch
Moderator Justin Jaeckle (Doclisboa Programmer)
Nicolás Prividera learns that his father suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. This is not a ‘subjective’ documentary or a praise of oblivion, but a look at that edge in which personal memory merges with social memory. A journey that takes us from an impenetrable diary that belongs to the mother to impossible dialogues with the father, from old family films to the traces of memories shared by each generation, from the ghosts of the city to the quest for the cult of memory in the contemporary world. A closure that returns to the origin.
Moderator Tomás Baltazar (Doclisboa Programmer)
A film about the Portuguese colonial empire as it is seen and shown through photography, from the end of the 19th century until the 1974 revolution that put an end to the political regime that ruled Portugal.
Using static shots of recurring motifs—city and landscapes (billboards, traffic signs, streets, industrial landscapes, gas containers, oil drilling rigs)—the film weaves them together with short scenes, textual inserts, experiments with film aesthetics and short homages to Hollis Frampton, George Landow, Michael Snow and Yvonne Rainer, who also appear in the film.
This piece takes place in a socially and economically oppressed Vienna in the 1930s, when Nazism was on the rise, and tells the story of a young woman struggling to survive in the city as she is the victim of forces she does not control. Running from Nazism, Ödön von Horváth wrote this piece in 1932, six years before he died in Paris at the age of 38. The main characters are played by Luísa Cruz, José Airosa, Márcia Breia, Marcantonio Del Carlo and Luís Mascarenhas, among others.
Enterrado na Loucura – Punk em Portugal 78-88 – A Segunda Vaga is a mind-blowing journey through the punk movement, which stayed alive in spite of being so often declared dead. The film gathers testimonies from the main punk characters in Portugal. In the end, all the energy of a performance by Mata-Ratos at the Academy of Linda-a-Velha.
Five perspectives on memory and distance. Da Minha Janela looks for the outside. Me More is the reminiscence of a dream in which voices and bodies get lost and found in Nature. Cristina confronts secret memories written in a diary with super 8mm images of a seemingly happy family. 42.ZE.66 follows a female trucker on international roads with family and friends echoing on phone calls. In Para outra maré, the beaches at Moledo and a pine forest recall past gestures.
Four films questioning the way in which we perceive reality. Terraformar opens up on the changes between matter, anthropic and cosmic. Phenomena enable us to explore urban landscapes in Praga Regada. Body and Nature blend in Semear, Ouvir, Fluir. Lembra-me da Vida Ali emerges from meetings with film directors Catarina Mourão, Susana de Sousa Dias and Catarina Alves Costa to seek the reality rebuild by cinema and the issues on life captured by a camera.
In a rich torrent of archival audio and visuals, paired with extracts from her own artworks and films, Ottinger resurrects the old Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Latin Quarter, with their literary cafés and jazz clubs, and revisits encounters with Jewish exiles, life with her artistic community, the world views of Parisian ethnologists and philosophers, the political upheavals of the Algerian War and May 1968, and the legacy of the colonial era. “I followed the footsteps of my heroines and heroes,” Ottinger narrates. “Wherever I found them, they will appear in this film too.”