Music and the stage, cinema and its masters, poetry, photography, fashion and Portuguese popular culture all fit into the beating heart of Doclisboa 2024’s Heart Beat section. Marie Losier‘s Peaches Goes Bananas opens the programme with a behind the scenes trip with the electropunk artist, cherishing her for the way she puts her body and its freedom at the centre of her art. Through interviews and archive footage, Chris Smith‘s Devo portrays the fifty-year career of the American synth-pop band, pioneers in both music and music videos. Striking a different chord, Before It’s Too Late, by an old friend of the festival, Mathieu Amalric, makes its international debut at Doclisboa, intimately following the Emerson String Quartet during the recording of their final album, Infinite Voyage, a majestic conclusion to their 47-year long career.
The music continues with Blur: To the End, by Toby L., which follows the new reunion of the cult band led by Damon Albarn, and the recording and concerts of their latest album, The Ballad of Darren. Pavements, by Alex Ross Perry, invents an experimental hybrid biopic docufiction to show the indie rock band Pavement preparing for their sold-out reunion tour in 2022, while creating a musical based on their songs. Guitars take over the screen in Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, by Thom Zimny, a film that combines images of rehearsals, backstage moments and testimonies from one of the kings of rock, which Doclisboa showcases on the big screen days before its arrival on the Disney+ platform on October 25th. Travelling through further different sonorities, the Heart Beat programme lands on Luiz Melodia — Within the Heart of Brazil, by Alessandra Dorgan, a work about the life and work of the singer-songwriter from Rio de Janeiro, narrated in the first person.
Heart Beat makes cinema look at itself in the mirror, and this year reveals the life of one of the biggest names in animation in Miyazaki, Spirit of Nature, by Léo Favier, focusing on the ecological values that guided the career of the creator of such unforgettable characters as Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro, 1988) or Chihiro (Spirited Away, 2001). From France comes three more films about filmmakers. Jacques Demy, the Pink and the Black, directed by Florence Platarets and Frédéric Bonnaud, brings out the vision of cinema of the author of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), via doubt and adversity. François Truffaut, My Life, a Screenplay, by David Teboul, reveals archives and unpublished images of the French master, on a journey with his old confidant Claude de Givray, months before his death. Looking for Robert, by Richard Copans, takes us into the universe, gestures and practices of film director Robert Kramer, with whom director and producer Copans worked for two decades.
Fashion is an art, and High & Low — John Galliano, by Kevin Macdonald, shows the world of John Galliano, one of the most acclaimed and controversial designers of recent times. The film features interviews with the designer and fashion insiders such as Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Anna Wintour. From the spotlights of the catwalks, we travel to the seclusion of the small town of Cesena, home of the acclaimed photographer whose name gives title to a film Doclisboa hosts for its world premiere: Guido Guidi Lives in Hiding, by Paulo Catrica. For more than 40 years, Guidi has been photographing ordinary things with a distinctive eye, while building an archive that is a portrait of rural and suburban Italy. The Heart Beat section also presents Ricardo Aleixo: Afro-Atlantic, by Rodrigo Lopes de Barros. From Boston to Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, the director experiments with different forms of video recording and uses the Brazilian author’s poems, voice and body to explore his peripheral and Afro-Brazilian condition.
Amongst Portuguese productions, a highlight is the world premiere of The Flight of The Crocodile – Ruy Cinatti’s Timor, by Fernando Vendrell, a look at the relationship — affective, ethnographic, artistic — that Cinatti developed with this distant island country, which ended up defining the course of his life. The section also includes two films curiously both made by a father and son. After Dance – A Concert Film, directed by one of the Expresso Transatlântico’s guitarists, Sebastião Varela — another world premiere — visually transposes a narrative of many formats shot in a ruined castle, with characters wandering to the sound of tracks from the album Ressaca Bailada, in a movement of both celebrating and questioning Portuguese cultural traditions. The Shrovetide Devil, by Diogo Varela Silva, takes us to one of the oldest Carnival traditions in Portugal, the Entrudo de Lazarim, and submerges us in everything that surrounds the Caretos — from the making of their masks and costumes to the gender dynamics generated by tradition and passed down between generations.
Finally, Turn in the Wound, by Abel Ferrara, with Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective (who recently exhibited together in Lisbon at MAC/CCB), searches for meaning in Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine, via first person narratives, performance and poetry, in a visual and musical letter of support for the Ukrainian people.
Doclisboa’s complete and full programme will be presented at a press conference on October 1st at 11am at Culturgest, Lisbon.
