Heart Beat asserts itself as a place to celebrate different artistic expressions. We present the latest works by filmmakers close to us, such as Marie Losier, with her portrait of The Residents, and Alison Ellwood, with Boy George.

Heart Beat
From London to New York, we follow the rise of a star in Becoming Madonna and revisit the 1990s with Jeff Buckley. Sami van Ingen shares memories of his great-grandfather Robert Flaherty, while Clay Tweel searches for Andy Kaufman. Pippo Delbono returns with the moving Bobò, Solveig Nordlund revisits the history of Teatro da Cornucópia, and Joana Botelho confronts the play Última Memória. Dimitris Papaioannou’s choreographies meet João Fiadeiro, who revives stages of his career. Anna Negri reencounters her father, Antonio, and Diogo Varela Silva follows boxer Orlando Jesus. Denis Côté takes us to the world of the submissive Paul, we meet queer artist Ivo Dimchev and return to the recent past of video clubs in Videoheaven. In a year marked by the departure of remarkable personalities, we remember David Lynch through the eyes of Stéphane Ghez and present the restored copy of Robert Wilson & the CIVIL warS. We also celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Luciano Berio’s birth with a session dedicated to his music.
— Luca D’Introno
TRIBUTE TO ROBERT WILSON
Robert Wilson, whose work transformed theatre since the 1960s, passed away on July 31. He rewrote the grammar that relates gesture and silence and created a universe where theatre dialogues with music, dance, the visual arts and architecture. The Portuguese public has always followed his work, and the São Luiz Theatre hosted the play Pessoa – Since I’ve Been Me in March. We present his early films and the newly restored version of Robert Wilson & the CIVIL warS, by Howard Brookner.
Stations
An enigmatic work, in which Wilson envisions the daydreams and fantasies of an eleven-year-old boy as a universe both magical and sinister. The pivotal image…
Video 50
A video sketchbook, a visually dramatic and frequently humorous collection of one hundred short ‘episodes’ produced for television. Unfolding as a series of thirty-second vignettes,…
Robert Wilson & the CIVIL warS
Robert Wilson & the CIVIL warSHoward Brookner’s rarely seen second documentary captures Robert Wilson’s visionary quest to unify six international theatre productions into a monumental global opera for the 1984…
TRIBUTE TO LUCIANO BERIO
On the day of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, we present a session dedicated to Luciano Berio, one of the key figures of the post-war European musical avant-garde. We thus celebrate the composer who sought incessantly to relate music to the different strands of humanistic knowledge and whose work, aimed at broadening the horizons of musical language, spans territories ranging from the electronic to the poetic.
Il canto d’amore di Prufrock
Il canto d'amore di PrufrockNico D’Alessandria’s graduation film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome features the director himself and is inspired by T. S. Eliot’s poem of…
The Colours of Light
I colori della luceThe first film shot entirely with polarised light. The filming was done by projecting pieces of glass directly onto the camera (the constantly changing images…
Sirènes
One of the pioneers of Belgian cinema, Émile Degelin, based this short film, which could be qualified as ‘filmed music’, on the electroacoustic composition for…
Voyage to Cythera
This documentary focuses on the third part of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, which consists of a number of musical quotes from composers like Mahler, Stravinsky, Boulez,…
HEART BEAT
Videoheaven
A socio-cultural hub, consumer mecca and source of existential dread, the video rental store changed the way we interact with movies. Narrated by Maya Hawke…
Boy George & Culture Club
Boy George & Culture ClubThis is an intimate portrait of a band’s meteoric rise to fame, dramatic split, and remarkable reunion for the film. For the first time, Boy…
Andy Kaufman Is Me
This documentary offers unprecedented access to the private world of comedy’s most enigmatic provocateur, Andy Kaufman, through a treasure trove of never-before-heard audio recordings. Featuring…
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley
Jeff Buckley, a rising star with an otherworldly voice, left the music world of the 1990s reeling when he died suddenly after the release of…
Punch for Punch
Soco a SocoIn the 1970s, Orlando Jesus was more than just a boxer: he embodied the tough spirit of Lisbon with its neighbourhood gyms, intense nights and…
Memoirs of Teatro da Cornucópia
Memórias do Teatro da CornucópiaA renowned symbol of Portuguese interventionist theatre, Cornucópia emerged from the darkness of fascism to fight dictatorship on stage. Among the classics, a project is…
Paul
Paul suffers from depression and social anxiety. He leads a solitary life at home bound by routine. As a big fan of Alice in Wonderland,…
Bull’s Heart
I kardia tou tavrouRenowned director and choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou and his team are preparing Transverse Orientation. Inspired by the myth of the Minotaur, the performance uses light as…
Becoming Madonna
Featuring never-before-seen photos, footage and recently uncovered audio tapes of young Madonna, this documentary traces her journey from being an insecure outsider in Michigan to…
Duran Duran: Unstaged
“This is not your normal concert…”, as David Lynch says in the beginning. It is more of a cinematic journey during Duran Duran’s historic performance…
One to One: John & Yoko
One to One: John & YokoOn August 30, 1972, John Lennon played his only full-length concert after leaving The Beatles: the rollicking, dazzling One to One show with Yoko Ono…
Pele Nómada
Pele Nómada is a film about memory and its displacements in the present. In the centre of a gentrified Lisbon, whose past is lost among…
It Was Dark Inside the Wolf
Estava Escuro na Barriga do LoboÚltima Memória, a play by Sara Carinhas, premiered at Teatro São Luiz in March 2023. Estava Escuro na Barriga do Lobo is not its making…
In Hell with Ivo
Hailing from Bulgaria, a conservative country where virtually no one is openly gay, emerges the flamboyant performance artist and musician Ivo Dimchev. Although he has…
Bobò
The film tells the story of Bobò, a deaf, mute and illiterate man with microcephaly, whom Pippo Delbono met at the Aversa mental asylum, where…
Cast of Shadows
Frances Hubbard Flaherty was the person who made all her husbands’ major films, from Nanook of the North to Louisiana Story, happen. Their three daughters,…
Toni, My Father
Toni, mio padreAnna was 14 when her father, Toni Negri, was jailed on charges of being the secret mastermind behind the Red Brigades, the spearhead of Italian…
Barking in the Dark
A journey into the mysterious and unclassifiable world of The Residents, emblematic figures of the American musical avant-garde for over 50 years. Hidden behind anonymity…
Welcome to Lynchland
David Lynch, une énigme à HollywoodDavid Lynch, an artist fascinated by the most deviant depths of the human soul, has composed his oeuvre like a riddle to decipher, on the…
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror
From its humble origins as a London fringe theatre play to its meteoric rise to become the biggest cult film of all time, this is…
Megadoc
A raw, fly-on-the-wall documentary about Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-long journey to create his self-financed passion project, Megalopolis. The bold and unrelenting epic returns in Mike…