Six months prior the 14th IndieLisboa, we announce the first two feature films that are part of the festival’s programme: Elon Não Acredita na Morte, by Ricardo Alves Jr., and The Challenge, by Yuri Ancarani. The first one was the winner of the IndieLisboa Award at the XII Panorama Internacional Coisa de Cinema, in Salvador, Bahia and the second one, a co-production between Italy, France and Switzerland, will be in competition (feature) in our festival.
Selected for several festivals in Brazil, the film was also the winner of the best actor award (Rômulo Braga) at the Brasilia Festival. After the disappearance of his wife, Elon begins a journey through the darkest places of the city, trying to understand what may have happened, at the same time he tries not to lose his sanity in this journey.
“It is a great joy to receive the IndieLisboa award, I am very happy, it is a festival that I admire, a festival where I always wanted to be and therefore I am overflowing with joy, for having been contemplated with this award,”, said Ricardo Alves Jr.. The director was born in Belo Horizonte (1982) and he made the short films Material Bruto (2006), Convite para Jantar com o Camarada Stalin (2007), in competition at IndieLisboa 2008, Permanências (2010) and Tremor (2013), screened at festivals such as Cannes, Locarno and Rotterdam.
The Challenge is an anthology of the modern desert. The film perfectly reveals the contradictions between ancient traditions of the Middle East – here symbolized by falconry – and modernity, with its ultramodern technology and other Western temptations. Thanks to micro-cameras, we also experience this environment from the perspective of the falcons and wild animals.
This is the fourth time that a film by Yuri Ancarani is on IndieLisboa’s programme, after San Siro, in 2015, Da Vinci, winner of the Short Film Grand Prize in the edition of 2013 and Il Capo (IndieLisboa 2012).