In this landmark year for our country, Doclisboa is pleased to share the opening and closing films and the second retrospective of its 22nd edition. This is the first look at a rich programme that generates a conversation between a present, a past and a future, where a series of necessary reflections on the cinema of our time converge in diverse and unexpected ways.
The Carnation Revolution and its echoes will be everywhere at the opening of the 22nd edition of Doclisboa, which this year runs from October 17th to 27th. Sempre, by Luciana Fina, which recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival and which, 50 years later, revisits and brings to the present the films, images, faces and forgotten or unfulfilled ideals of the revolution, opens the festival and has its screening scheduled for October 17th at Cinema São Jorge. To close, Doclisboa is showing The Day I Met You, by Brazilian filmmaker André Novais Oliveira, a chronicler of everyday life par excellence who here ventures into romantic comedy as we’ve never seen it before. The meeting with the audience is scheduled for the 26th at Culturgest.
OPENING
Luciana Fina, an Italian artist who’s lived in Portugal since the 1990’s and who presented Andromeda at Doclisboa last year, now returns to premiere a film that is as powerful as it is disenchanted about April 25th 1974. Sempre is a film made of films – it was based on an invitation from the Cinemateca Portuguesa to create an installation on the occasion of the Revolution’s 50th anniversary, using the national film archive and RTP’s image repository. Using excerpts from a variety of more or less well known works, and a remarkable research and editing work, Luciana Fina draws a portrait of a bygone and utopian time. At the same time, using sound recordings of moments from the present, the director transports these archive images into contemporary times, placing them in dialogue with today’s struggles – from the housing crisis to climate justice, from women’s rights to the rights of cultural workers, confronting us with all that remains to be done.
“Sempre is a tribute to the cinema that has interfered in history and gives us back the hypothesis of an extraordinary moment today. The film runs through the asphyxiation of Salazarism and PIDE, the student occupations in ’69, the Armed Forces Movement in ’74, the dreams, programs and perspectives of PREC, the ‘Hot Summer’ of ’75, decolonization and, above all, proposes again the gestures of great filmmakers who went into action together with artists, songwriters, composers and radio directors,” reads the text presenting the opening film of Doclisboa.
CLOSING
Closing this year’s edition, the festival screens The Day I Met You, by André Novais Oliveira, a key name in so-called Brazilian ‘Cinema of the Periphery’ – a cinema that steps back from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to portray a much more complex country in all its simplicity. In the naturalistic, almost documentary style that characterizes his works, Novais Oliveira settles in his territory (Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, the suburbs) and presents us with a kind of unintentional romantic comedy. The Day I Met You is the story of a man and a woman (Renato Novais and Grace Passô) who try to stay afloat in a disjointed world, and who one day meet. “The romantic comedy aspect wasn’t very thought through, but instead the humor, trying to bring humor to the film. This goes back to my short film Fantasmas, which I made in 2010. It’s humorous and most of the films I’ve directed deal with relationships and love affairs,” says the director, who will be present at this edition of Doclisboa.
The Day I Met You is the simple story – without heroes, villains or stereotypes – of two people who get close, support each other and then desire each other. Through them, we discover in detail the urban fabric in which they move and find beauty and grace in their small gestures and frailties. “I really like to portray everyday life in a more direct way in my films,” explains the director, whose Quando Aqui will also be showing at Doclisboa, a film in which André Novais Oliveira returns to his family home, the territory of other of his films, to propose an amazing journey between a distant past and futures that we can only guess, in a game between memory and desire.
SPECIAL PROGRAM BACK TO THE FUTURE
This year, Doclisboa’s section New Visions presents a special program curated by Jean-Pierre Rehm, who regularly collaborates with the festival. Back to the Future proposes to “explore in some films the link that connects modernism, that is, nothing less than the utopia of the 20th century, and cinema”, explains the critic and professor in the text that presents this set of films.
Remaining faithful to the section’s initial premise, of looking to the future starting from the past, the proposed films experiment with the materiality of film and light, with the possibilities of editing and with the relationship between the presence, or absence, of bodies and the space that surrounds them.
In Rehm’s programming, several previously unreleased titles in Portugal stand out, such as Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951), by the Romanian Isidore Isou, where the conventional way of making cinema is called into question, being offered, as an alternative, a scratchy film and sound that doesn’t match the image – a deconstructed story. In turn, in the film Per Speculum (2006), by Adrian Paci, the viewer accesses a space that does not need definition, where a group of children enter into a dialogue with sunlight through fragments of a mirror, which results in a free and dynamic visual experience.
From Albania comes If and If Only (2005), by the artist Anri Sala, where a snail walks along a viola bow, affecting a performance of the piece ‘Elegy for Viola Solo’, by Stravinsky, a disturbance that leads the conductor to adapt the concert to the conditions imposed by the new physical relationship that is generated there. One last highlight for Phantoms of Nabua (2009), by Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a film that has light as the main character and where the comfort of home is explored, on the one hand, as well as its destruction, on the other.
The press conference for the 22nd edition of Doclisboa, in which the complete program will be announced, is scheduled for October 1st, at Culturgest.
Doclisboa, organized by Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário, thanks all friends, partners and associates that make this 22nd edition possible as well as the festival’s return to the city to show the public some of the best cinema in the world.
