The full programme for Doclisboa 2024, which runs from the 17th to the 27th October at the festival’s usual venues – Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa, Cinema Ideal and now also at the Casa do Comum in Bairro Alto – is now known. In all, the 22nd edition shows 183 films from 55 countries, including 28 world premieres, 19 international premieres and 30 Portuguese films, which together compose a portrait of contemporaneity and humanity, and of what surrounds, impassions and torments them both. More than 160 guests will visit Lisbon in October.
This year’s International Competition features 12 films from the same number of countries and includes five world premieres, six international premieres, one European premiere and one first work. In the Portuguese Competition there are ten works competing: four world premieres, one European premiere, five Portuguese premieres and three first works. The full list of these films follows below.
The New Visions section once again presents the latest films by great cinematic innovators such as Andrei Ujică, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Radu Jude and Harmony Korine. This year’s Invited Director is Frenchman Pierre Creton, presenting a programme (Go, Toto!, 7 Walks with Mark Brown) that wanders in relation to the natural world through the films of this highly sensitive farmer-filmmaker – who himself is portrayed in another film in this section, I Am Pierre Creton, Normand and Filmmaker, by Dominique Auvray. From the land, to the screen: Phil Solomon transforms the landscapes of the game Grand Theft Auto into elegiac virtual and dystopian worlds (Still Raining, Still Dreaming, Rehearsals for Retirement), whilst, the fever dream of Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft offers a tale of violence and redemption with the texture of a multiplayer video game.
New Visions guides us through Andrei Ujică‘s fixation on the Beatles’ trip to New York in 1965 and the perplexity, past and present, of America’s social landscape, in TWST – Things We Said Today. Radu Jude manifests the playfulness inherent to his cinema once again in Eight Postcards from Utopia, a montage film that collates material from post-socialist advertisements in Romania. Doclisboa also presents the international premiere of a new film by an essential name in European cinema: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Now in his 80s, almost three decades after his last film Syberberg returns with Demmin Cantos, a film about Demmin, the town in north-eastern Germany where the director was born and which was the scene of one of the largest mass suicides in the post-WWII period. Syberberg, author, among many others of Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), will be present in person at Doclisboa, and the festival will also show Ludwig. Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), as part of the retrospective Back to the Future, curated by Jean-Pierre Rehm.
In the year of Augusto M. Seabra’s passing, a key figure in the history of Doclisboa and the New Visions section in particular, the festival dedicates this edition to him. A screening, called Exordium, will present one of the first films Seabra programmed for New Visions: Compilations, 12 instants d’amour non partagé, by Frank Beauvais – a work in which small gestures of love and music coexist. Scheduled for October 20th at 3.30pm at Culturgest, this session will be free entrance, requiring only the ticket to be collected at the venue on the day. One director whose ongoing relationship to Doclisboa is closely linked to Augusto M. Seabra’s championing his very first feature is Daniel Hui, who returns to the festival to present his new work: Small Hours of the Night, a film of interiority and shadows engaging 1960s Singapore and its political ghosts. Hui’s film has Beckettian overtones, in a direct line with another in the programme: If I Fall, Don’t Pick Me Up, by Declan Clarke, which explores the decade-and-a-half-long correspondence between Samuel Beckett and director Walter. D Asmus.
In the From the Earth to the Moon section, two restored prints are highlighted: One Is Few, Two Would Fill (1970), a film by Odion Lopes, a pioneer of black cinema; and The Castle of Purity, by Mexican Arturo Ripstein. The section also presents Mexican-Canadian Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night, in which the contemporary filmmaker explores new narrative forms.
Elsewhere, the competitive Green Years section continues to occupy a special place in Doclisboa’s programme, through the revelation of new talents. Nebulae, the festival’s industry space, presents Spain as its guest country, and the abcDoc educational project once again emphasises the power of documentaries as an educational tool.
The Doclisboa 2024 press conference took place this morning at Culturgest and was attended by Paula Astorga (Doclisboa Director), Mark Deputter (Chairman of the Board – Culturgest), Laurentina Pereira (Municipal Director of Culture – CML), and Rui Machado (Director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema), as well as Doclisboa’s programmers Justin Jaeckle (Associate Programmer and New Visions section) and Luca D’Introno (Heart Beat and Green Years section Programmer). Luciana Fina, director of Sempre, the opening film of this year’s edition, also took part in the session.
All details of the programme, juries, competitive sections and prizes are now available.
The box offices at Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa and Cinema Ideal, and the online box offices Blueticket and Ticketline, open on October 3rd.
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INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION FILMS
. [anan], Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat | Belgium (World Premiere)
.The Anchor, Jen Debauche | Belgium (World Premiere)
. Apparition, Camila Freitas | Brazil (World Premiere – new version)
. Instead of Trees, Philipp Hartmann | Germany, Argentina (World Premiere)
. Fire Supply, Lucía Seles | Argentina (European Premiere)
. A 200 Dinars Note, Lamine Ammar-Khodja | Argelia, France (World Premiere)
. Well Ordered Nature, Eva C. Heldmann | Germany (International Premiere)
. The Wolves, Isabelle Prim | France (International Premiere)
. My Friend Pedro MIXTAPE, Lincoln Péricles | Brazil (International Premiere)
. The Shards, Masha Chernaya | Georgia, Russia (World Premiere)
. Tales from the Source, Léonard Pongo | Belgium, Democratic Republic of Congo (International Premiere)
. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), Suneil Sanzgiri | USA, India (International Premiere)
PORTUGUESE COMPETITION FILMS
. Blue, Ana Vîjdea | Romania, Belgium, Hungary, Portugal (Portuguese Premiere)
. Sulfur, Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes | Portugal, Brazil (World Premiere)
. Resonance Spiral, Filipa César, Marinho de Pina | Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, Germany (Portuguese Premiere)
. I Am Here, Zsófia Paczolay, Dorian Rivière | Portugal (European Premiere)
. Fire of Wind, Marta Mateus | Portugal, Switzerland, France (Portuguese Premiere)
. At Trafaria, Pedro Florêncio | Portugal (World Premiere)
. The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder, Inadelso Cossa | Mozambique, Germany, France, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway (Portuguese Premiere)
. The Palace of Citizens, Rui Pires | Portugal (World Premiere)
. Unstable Rocks, Ewelina Rosinska | Germany, Portugal (World Premiere)
. The Flame of a Candle, André Gil Mata | Portugal, France (Portuguese Premiere)
