Mark Jenkin, that won the festival’s Audience Award in 2019 with Bait, directs a film about the haunting power of creation. A Cornish poet finds a briefcase with her initials. Inside there is a ghost looking for someone to complete his poem.
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A suitcase, a poem, characters that move through chance, and projections, in a game of mirrors and coincidences (the suitcase is responsible). The ghosts wake up and the narrative is composed, fragmented, destroyed, while signs of a curse emerge and multiply in this black drama. The contagion is in the creation, it is in the tide of the ‘‘ wind ’’ that scourges the plans, by the seductive look of Jenkin that cuts and cuts this disturbing and cutting narrative, black and white. (Carlota Gonçalves)
In the midst of a heatwave of insanity, two children find a way to cool everyone down! A playful stop motion short film animated in a hybrid technique between cut out, clay animation and thousands of replacement pieces.
The duo Dornieden and Monroy, also known as OJOBOCA, works fiction and fable from the use of scientific arguments. Here we have the investigation about the Auroch, a species of wild bovine, first documented case of extinction in the seventeen century. With 16 mm film and an inventive use of sound, the disappearance and efforts to recuperate this mythical animal are the starting points for a relationship with an also mythical idea of Europe.
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The Auroch or Uruz is a species of wild cattle that inhabited regions of Europe, Asia and North Africa.
It is considered the ancestor of current domestic cattle and is the first case of extinction to be documented, as a consequence of the high hunting as well as the introduction of modern cattle. The decline and extinction of the last wild aurochs is believed to have occurred in 1627 in the Jaktorów forest, Poland. Although the Auroch is considered a food source, it is distinguished by its physical traits such as strength, speed, endurance and courage. However, these physical traits are intertwined with symbolic powers, derived from a superstition associated with certain members of the animal elements such as the skin of the skull and a cross-shaped bone near the heart being coveted for their magical and supernatural properties.
Her Name Was Europa is Juan David González Monroy and Anja Dorniden’s first feature film and explores, with a clinical eye, the modern attempt to resurrect the aurochs from eternal extinction. (Inês Lima Torres)
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
The documentaries Herdeiros de Saramago, created by Carlos Vaz Marques, are dedicated to the writers that won the Saramago literary prize. In this session we will see four of these films, about the career and life of João Tordo, Adriana Lisboa, Paulo José Miranda and Ondjaki. The delicate and detailed attentive gaze of Graça Castanheira’s direction allows us to enter in the daily life of these artists, while travelling from the written words to the spoken ones.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
The documentaries Herdeiros de Saramago, created by Carlos Vaz Marques, are dedicated to the writers that won the Saramago literary prize. In this session we will see four of these films, about the career and life of João Tordo, Adriana Lisboa, Paulo José Miranda and Ondjaki. The delicate and detailed attentive gaze of Graça Castanheira’s direction allows us to enter in the daily life of these artists, while travelling from the written words to the spoken ones.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
The documentaries Herdeiros de Saramago, created by Carlos Vaz Marques, are dedicated to the writers that won the Saramago literary prize. In this session we will see four of these films, about the career and life of João Tordo, Adriana Lisboa, Paulo José Miranda and Ondjaki. The delicate and detailed attentive gaze of Graça Castanheira’s direction allows us to enter in the daily life of these artists, while travelling from the written words to the spoken ones.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
The documentaries Herdeiros de Saramago, created by Carlos Vaz Marques, are dedicated to the writers that won the Saramago literary prize. In this session we will see four of these films, about the career and life of João Tordo, Adriana Lisboa, Paulo José Miranda and Ondjaki. The delicate and detailed attentive gaze of Graça Castanheira’s direction allows us to enter in the daily life of these artists, while travelling from the written words to the spoken ones.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
Behind a children’s game there is a story about the perception of time. To win the game, the young boy becomes an old man and his life one hide and seek game. Poetic visions are created from childhood memories but they also touch adults.
Who could say they never started to dream about food at the end of a boozing night out? And the greasier the better, right? Laura Hodkin’s graduation film is about one of those nights when the first crime is a nutritional one.
A scientist is immersed in observing the clouds. He counts how many there are, measures their distance to the ground and weighs the water which they are made of. But suddenly everything changes when a cloud doesn’t quite fit what his registers.
Hugo always wanted to have a puppy dog. One day he meets Holger and his dream comes true. But Holger is not a dog after all, but a baby elephant instead. A film about friendship and the playful world full of discoveries seen through the eyes of a child.
In his desk at the Brynmor Jones Library, the poet Philip Larkin had a photograph of Guy The Gorilla, a famous attraction at the London Zoo. This Stephen Sutcliffe’s short collage is a meditation on work and how it can be a prison.
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Guy was a London Zoo gorilla famous for his gentle disposition and for receiving sweets from visitors. Here, his inner life is perhaps more similar to that of a detective from a saxophone-soaked eighties noir, who comments vaguely on the human experience. A contrast capable of causing a smile on the stoniest of faces. (Ana Cabral Martins)
The film depicts thoughts and feelings of a mother with her mentally disabled son. While she moves with him through everyday life, her ambivalent feelings, her struggles to accept him as he is, get into her way.
Similarly to Éric Rohmer, who always liked to organise his films through series, Piñeiro has also been doing what he calls the “Shakespeareads”. Films that adapt comedies by the English dramaturg to the relationships of a contemporary youth generation. Here the play is Measure for Measure and in its centre is a precise mosaic, of a nonlinear temporality, in which the professional and personal choices of the actress Mariel (María Villar) are being equated.
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Piñeiro’s films are like himself: sober, elegant, distinct and special. Isabella, named after a Shakespearean character, is the aspiration of Mariel who wants to represent her but finds it difficult to concentrate due to financial problems. The film is never simple in its construction and the viewer is invited to unravel the countless possibilities of narrative that each scene gives us. So, who looks at what, as in the magnificent opening where we see a person at the bottom of a small pier and we will review this shot often and in different ways. In Piñeiro’s cinema, the characters take the pain of those who they want to play as if life is nothing more than an acting game, which means a fine and critical thinking about contemporary society. It is not a coincidence that he takes advantage of the Shakespearean universe of great themes to establish a common universal point, and then he is free to speak about what interests him. Its great power is to make things simple and meaningful. (Miguel Valverde)
Back in 1986, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies, in Huntsville, Ontario. Despite its innovating folk-electronica hybrid sonorities, the cassette was forgotten. Suddenly, three decades later, a rare-record collector in Japan reissued the album and finally the music found its listeners. The musician, now Glenn Copeland, starts its first international tour at the age of 74.
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Keyboard Fantasies is not a popular record – not even to those into the spectrum between folk and ambient. When listening to it, with more or less attention, we learn very little about Beverly-Glenn Copeland. The way the musician balances his beats, as well as his silences and his tender voice, don’t gives us any hint about his life as one of the faces of the never-ending fight for the LGBT rights in Canada 70s, a time when it was still punished by law. If we can admit that his music stays in our minds for its balance, we can say that it’s with the same stability that Beverly tells us about his life and the record that was only valued three decades after its first edition. A story of struggling, courage and spiritual wisdom, teaching us that “We are ever new”. (Filipa Henriques)
Last year Patrícia Delgado’s short film The Hood was presented in the national competition at IndieLisboa. The Portuguese director, L.A. based, signs now her first feature film, a coming of age story of a young Latin student, Aleteia, who looks forward to pursuing her studies at the university. With a realistic style and attentive look, this is also a vision of the tense American political atmosphere at the moment, as well as the dissensions within the Hispanic community.
Laniakea is a galaxy supercluster that contains our Milky Way. In this melancholic, disquieting film-journey, we proceed musically through the elements we’re made of. The animal, the water, the sky, mannequins and broken stones.
