New Visions

Ana Carolina Teixeira Soares, também conhecida como Ana Carolina, é uma das autoras mais marcantes do cinema brasileiro com uma filmografia diversa e acutilante entre a ficção e o documentário. O Doclisboa apresenta o seu último filme, Paixões Recorrentes, e a sua primeira longa-metragem, Getúlio Vargas. Com quase 50 anos de diferença, os dois filmes dissecam a sua contemporaneidade, traçando uma linha crítica entre o passado e o presente do Brasil.

A trained political scientist, and a regular at Doclisboa since his first feature won the Special Jury Prize in 2011, the research-based practice of filmmaker and artist Éric Baudelaire employs politics and poetics to engage the world’s structures of power and relations, through a cinema that explores—and is created at—the intersection of reality and its documentation. Baudelaire presents his two latest films, alongside a work by Louis Malle.

In 2015, Doclisboa organised the first complete retrospective of Želimir Žilnik, a key figure of Yugoslav Black Wave. These four short films, made between 1973 and 1975 in West Germany, were considered lost and, therefore, weren’t shown. The miracle happened: they were recently rediscovered, as well as the material for his second feature, Freedom or Cartoons. Journal About Želimir Žilnik follows the efforts to finish this film fifty years later.

Humankind takes shape around two notions: permanence and flow. In the overwhelming permanence there is always something flowing, and in the inevitable flow there is always something permanent. Ghosts emerge in that breach in time and space. They’re unknown changes, open secrets through which stories slip. Films that wonder about what remains and what disappears, what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is sought and what is found.

Once an editor for Agnès Varda, Patricia Mazuy is now a singular master of contemporary cinema who makes genre films with unique craft and intelligence. In Before Saturn, Laurent Achard follows her at the preparation stage of the new thriller, Saturn Bowling. Mazuy creates the mise-en-scene of underground bowling, a main stage of struggle between two brothers in this night world. How to imagine the whole universe and then make a film out of it?

Encompassing our time is an ongoing process of trial and error. There’s a new kids’ TV show. It is an adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and the coloured imaging is so exaggerated that the notion of childhood is grotesquely disconnected. On YouTube, a comedian tries to joke about war, and the sound of raves and hurricanes shaking the Earth is also there. There are many voices trying to explain the world—narrators thrive and so do narratives.

Three odes to a lonely art turning one’s home into a factory of dreams and imagination. In Me and Ma and Everything and Nothing, Sasha Pirker reflects on the concept of negative space, accompanying the Moon with different sounds. Fatima, by 94-year-old Bruno Sukrow, is a fairy tale about the dancer and her kidnappers. Francis Brou, in The World Mutates, shares the thoughts of a man who lives in his studio, disconnected from any social environment.

Desire inhabits the paradox of fiction, as it is mostly imagined, a projection onto something or someone. It is constructed on images, films, books or even on someone of whom we only have a glimpse in the darkness. This programme is based on films that explore how eroticism and sexuality have been represented in cinema and literature, but it is also a meditation on how erotic fantasy lives within the blurred frontiers between fiction and reality.

Eight Deadly Shots, shot by Mikko Niskanen in 1972, is considered by many (including Aki Kaurismäki) as the best Finnish film in history. Thanks to the efforts of Peter von Bagh and Martin Scorcese, it finally could be seen outside its homeland. The Story of Mikko Niskanen is a labour of love and of many years of work by von Bagh himself, ‘a Renaissance man’, which peers inside the soul of this director and his works with great intensity and ardour.

Sasaki Yusuke moves to Tottori, Japan’s least populated province. Knowing there are only three cinemas in the region, he starts looking for those who love to watch films. In this exciting journey, he comes across a surprisingly great number of groups and organisations that tell us about the way their notions of community are strengthened in a deep relation with watching films collectively. Cinema is alive and so is cinephilia.