Here are the winning titles of the 19th edition of IndieLisboa 2022:
Feature Film Grand Prize City of Lisbon
Dry Ground Burning, Adirley Queirós + Joana Pimenta
Jury Statement: Feature Film Grand Prize of City of Lisbon goes for a film with an intricate construction and strength of the characters and the complexity of the structure and setting. The magnetic atmosphere throughout of the whole film turns it into an actual 21st century Epic.
Feature Film Grand Prize City of Lisbon – Special Mention
The Great Movement, Kiro Russo
Jury Statement: We would like to make a special mention to an unexpected UFO within the competition, a masterfully edited movie with a hypnotizing quality that makes it a truly cinematic experience. A city symphony of images, characters, and emotions that portrait the difficult co habitation of the different traditions and lifestyles these days.
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| Dry Ground Burning | The Great Movement |
TVCINE Special Award
Medusa, Anita Rocha da Silveira
Jury Statement: For the surprising and attractive approach to an actual and disturbing topic, the use of strong colours as well as the original use of pop culture references as a storytelling tool in an unusual setting.
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| Medusa |
EMEL Short Film Grand Prize
Mistida, Falcão Nhaga
The Parent’s Room, Diego Marcon
Jury Statement: The Grand Prize is shared by two films that impressed us equally: on the one side, a haunting and tender murder ballad, and on the other, a mother and son voyage through space and time. It is disarming the way the film addresses complex themes related to history, racism, politics, intimate relationships, in a narrative that takes place in an apparent, but only apparent, simplicity: the touching walk back home of a mother and son. There is an impressive maturity in the way the Director directed his film: the slow pace, the long shots, the minimalism and the clarity of purpose are here a sign of sensitivity, delicacy and respect. With a mix of 35mm, CGI effects, prostetic masks, human bodies and songs, the Director created an unsettling and uncanny universe that all together references, subverts, deconstructs and honor cinematic genres of musicals, horror and comedy. The characters still poses and eerie singing voice are deeply haunting and touching. All the time the disturbing quality of the film goes hand in hand with a sentimental atmosphere, generating a surprising feeling of empathy that will last with you for a long time.
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| Mistida | The Parent’s Room |
Best Animation Award
The Parent’s Room, Diego Marcon
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| The Parent’s Room |
Best Documentary Award
Urban Solutions, Arne Hector + Luciana Mazeto + Minze Tummescheit + Vinícius Lopes
Jury Statement: A film that is at the same time deeply unsettling and wonderfully playful. Using various sources of image and text material and performative moments, it is both visually spectacular and urgent in its politics by linking Brazil’s colonial past to the country’s contemporary two-class society. It makes full advantage of cinema’s capacity to stun and stir, to contemplate and engage, to charge and not simply judge.
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| Urban Solutions |
Best Fiction Award
Scarce, Gabriela Gaia Meirelles + Clara Anastácia
Jury Statement: The film is captivating and touching. It is hilarious, excessive and eccentric in its theatricality and at the same time, it reveals a scarcity, an immense fragility. And all of that without ever losing a sense of humor. Through the exuberant character Rose, it shows a radically unequal Brazil, where echoes the repeated stigma of colonialism and its way of operating: he exploitation of an extensive population by a small group of privileged. Scarce is a film of rebellion. It is a fiction so genuine to the point of becoming documentary.
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| Scarce |
Award for Best Portuguese Feature Film
Dry Ground Burning, Adirley Queirós + Joana Pimenta
Jury Statement: This socially and politically charged film immerses us in a fascinating trance from beginning to end. It’s a magnificent and hypnotic film that brilliantly explores the active role of this group of strong women that fight for their survival and the resistance of a community.
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| Dry Ground Burning |
NOVA FCSH Award for Best Director in a Portuguese Feature Film
The Kegelstatt Trio, Rita Azevedo Gomes
Jury Statement: For the poetic freedom with which she proposes a cinematic adaptation of Eric Rohmer’s text, layering the rigor of the mise-en-scene in a playful relationship with the act of narration.
NOVA FCSH Award for Best Director in a Portuguese Feature Film – Special Mention
Périphérique Nord, Paulo Carneiro
Jury Statement: The jury would like to give a special mention to a director, whose film takes us into a subculture defined by horsepower, gasoline and burned rubber. Through his unique on-screen presence as empathetic listener he manages to tell a story not only about the men and women living and dying for tuned cars, but address wider societal contexts of migration, status and belonging.
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| The Kegelstatt Trio | Périphérique Nord |
Dolce Gusto Award for Best Portuguese Short Film
Domy + Ailucha – Ket Stuff!, Ico Costa
Jury Statement: For its ability to liberate images in circumstances that limit action and storytelling, returning to its rightful owners the observation of life even during lockdown time.
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| Domy + Ailucha – Ket Stuff! |
The Yellow Color New Talent Award
An Avocado Pit, Ary Zara
Jury Statement: A simple yet complex story of “trans girl meets cis boy” in confident, empathetic fashion, creating a film of hope, understanding, empowerment, friendship and maybe, just maybe: love.
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| An Avocado Pit |
Novíssimos Betclic Award
Tindergraf, Júlia Barata
Jury Statement: Tindergraf stuck with us both for its plastic quality and its sense of humour, keeping the storytelling dynamic through decisions at the level of sound and acting. An unfurling of episodes between public and intimate spaces about hook-up culture, but also the search for one’s own pleasure, in the feminine.
Novíssimos Betclic Award – Special Mention
Maps, Lourenço Crespo
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| Tindergraf | Maps |
Silvestre Award for Best Feature Film
This House, Miryam Charles
We, Students!, Rafiki Fariala
Jury Statement: The selection of feature films in the Silvestre section of this edition of IndieLisboa was particularly diverse in form, material and content, intellectually and emotionally stimulating, and it was a pleasure for us to watch the eleven films that comprised it. Taking into account this strong body of films, we decided to award the prize to two films that the jury agreed were the most outstanding in this section. These are films that renew our confidence in cinema, two films in which their Directors, together with their networks of affection, whether family or friendship, reclaim for themselves the tools of cinema to re-imagine their past and future. One of them, a gesture of great courage, dives into the land of the dead to invent a space-time for all those who seek the place to which they belong. The other takes from the history of cinema the freshness of a direct language and a genuine gaze to tenderly dwell on the simple everyday life of ordinary people.
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| This House | We, Students! |
Silvestre Award for Best Short Film
Constant, Sasha Litvintseva + Beny Wagner
Jury Statement: We were impressed with Sasha and Beny’s deft handling of what could be considered forebodingly complex subject matter, particularly their ability to explain and engage at the same time. Their use of formally innovative techniques made for a distinct visual experience that had a real impact on us all, and also (perhaps more importantly) on the audience in attendance. A singular meditation on measurement, state power and opaque systems of informations.
Silvestre Award for Best Short Film – Special Mention
Churchill, Polar Bear Town, Annabelle Amoros
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| Constant | Churchill, Polar Bear Town |
IndieMusic Award
Love, Deutschmarks and Death, Cem Kaya
Jury Statement: The film is a story told in several voices about a common struggle.
What it brings is not the awareness that oppression, discrimination and exclusion give rise to contexts conducive to the need for expression, creation and contestation. Its value is not only in the pertinence of the themes and issues it tackles – racism, the exploitation of immigrant workers, the collective and artistic struggle of these communities – in this case the Turkish one, in Germany, but it could be another one, since that is and has been Europe’s pattern in its relationship with the one it considers Other. What made us like this film so much is not only in its content and in what it tells us in particular but, above all, in the articulation between what it tells us and the way in which it tells it. This is a film that listens and lets us listen, that is shared by all its actors. Without deification or paternalism, it incorporates all the richness and multiplicity contained in the music itself that it tells us about, exemplifying the capacity to transform a position of imposed alterity into a place of identity and confluence, but also of resistance and cultural preservation. A place that is inevitably collective, intergenerational and in constant change. Along these lines, we also wanted to highlight another film that equally transmitted to us a special fusion between content and form. Sonosfera Telectu is a film that can be seen as it is heard, an object that transports us and takes us on a journey through a symbiotic montage of images and sounds, whose narrative comes and goes in search of paths, mimicking Telectu’s own processes of minimalist musical improvisation. These choices were unanimous and cross several criteria, but, above all, and taking into account the section for which we were invited to deliberate, they point to films that stand out for embodying aspects of the music on which they focus, in their own structure. And because, for this very reason, they centralise, each one in its own way, a music or musical scene that flourishes on the margins – or on the fringes – or that is thus considered from a hegemonic point of view. Finally, and on the subject of structures, hegemonies, collective struggles and margins, we would like to add our voice to the criticism made in the context of the screening of the film FRÁGIL, in the form of a speech that rightly denounces the complicity of this type of festival in maintaining a logic of competition and exclusivity that can and should be rethought. As jurors, we did what we set out to do: think and discuss the films we saw, choose the one we liked best and explain why. Because the problem is not that there are worse or better films, or that we like some or others more, let alone that we talk about it. Critical comparison is good and important, it’s natural and productive. The question here is about rethinking the space that festivals like these occupy and in detriment of which few options are left to those who want to make cinema their life, when perhaps they could even have a more direct and democratic impact against the precarious conditions in which many of the films presented are made. The logic of the competition is not only about what happens during the festival but also before, during the selection and programming, in parallel and as part of a larger structure, which it is urgent to challenge and transform.
IndieMusic Award – Special Mention
Sonosfera Telectu, Carlos Mendes + Ilda Teresa Castro + Vítor Rua + Vasco Bação
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| Love, Deutschmarks and Death | Sonosfera Telectu |
Amnesty International Jury
Urban Solutions, Arne Hector + Luciana Mazeto + MinzeTummescheit + Vinícius Lopes
Jury Statement: For the film’s current and relevant approach to the theme, for the parallelism between the colonial past and present, and the chosen staging approach. Because of the highlight given to the differences between classes and the contrasts between the privilege of security of a wealthy elite and other human rights of all people. The rich die of hunger and fear without “the invisible ones”. But also, because of the power of the collective force to make the change. It is possible to jump outside the frame.
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| Urban Solutions |
Árvore da Vida Jury
Journey to the Sun, Ansgar Schaefer + Susana de Sousa Dias
Jury Statement: The smiles and looks of concern and expectation, sadness and abandonment, questioning and hope that the director gives us to contemplate at length, lead the viewer on a journey made of lights and shadows that crosses poverty and illiteracy, politics and religion, segregation and mercy, tears and hope, separation and reunion. A film that safeguards the memory and which, at the same time, subtly proposes an education in solidarity that is ever more necessary in our times.
Árvore da Vida Jury – Special Mention
Waters of Pastaza, Inês T. Alves
Jury Statement: It’s another world that the director reveals to us in this film, in which the simplicity, strength and beauty of nature intersect with the joy of childhood, which has so much to teach and to amaze the adults of a civilisation that so often forgets its roots.
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| Journey to the Sun | Waters of Pastaza |
Schools Award
By Flávio, Pedro Cabeleira
Jury Statement: The film distinguishes itself in the way it questions the ambitions of a young single mother and her relationship with her own body and image, and in the performance of the actors in the way it ironises female objectification in the conventions of modern rap, in the urban hinterland of Portugal.
Schools Award – Special Mention
An Avocado Pit, Ary Zara
Jury Statement: For surprising by revealing the possibility of a world appeased by its differences.
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| By Flávio | An Avocado Pit |
Universities Award
Dry Ground Burning, Adirley Queirós + Joana Pimenta
Jury Statement: For its ability to confront us with such distant realities and to provoke discussions that go beyond the cinema room.
Universities Award – Special Mention
Waters of Pastaza, Inês T. Alves
Jury Statement: The university jury awards an honorable mention to a film that stands out for presenting a unique perspective of a supposedly known reality.
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| Dry Ground Burning | Waters of Pastaza |
Audience Award – Feature Film
Cesária Évora, Ana Sofia Fonseca
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| Cesária Évora |
Audience Award – Short Film
An Avocado Pit, Ary Zara
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| An Avocado Pit |
Audience Award – IndieJunior
Luce e o Rochedo, Britt Raes
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| Luce and the Rock |
Screenings of the awarded films at Cinema Ideal
Monday
20:00
Scarce, Gabriela Gaia Meirelles + Clara Anastácia
Tindergraf, Júlia Barata
The Parents’ Room, Diego Marcon
Mistida, Falcão Nhaga
22:00
We, Students!, Rafiki Fariala
Terça-feira
20:00
Domy + Ailucha – Ket Stuff!, Ico Costa
Urban Solutions, Arne Hector + Luciana Mazeto + Minze Tummescheit + Vinícius Lopes
an Avocado Pit, Ary Zara
How Do You Measure a Year, Jay Rosenblatt
22:00
Medusa, Anita Rocha da Silveira
Quarta-feira
20:00
Love, Deutschmarks and Death, Cem Kaya
22:00
Dry Ground Burning, Adirley Queirós + Joana Pimenta