In the morning, the little fox wakes up and his duck parents feed him breakfast, a carrot. He goes out to play and finds an adult fox in the forest hunting a bird. This encounter will trouble little fox’s family bonds.
Realizador:
Today, Iranian cinema is associated with poetry and humanism. But it wasn’t always like that. Ehsan Khoshbakht, co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, reaches for his VHS private collection and also some reels of films that survived censorship, to create a journey through filmfarsi. This is the term that designates the popular cinema before the 1979 revolution, where tearful musicals, violence, sex and comedy dominated film screens.
Ana Maria Gomes returns to Bustarenga, a village in the interior of Portugal, and starts to hear the usual “mantra”: “already with that age and still single and no kids?” A film about the social pressures and the places of a still dominant masculinity.
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Ana lives in Paris but every summer she goes to a small village called Bustarenga in the interior of Portugal. She is 36 years old and single. What follows is a reflection on finding love through the lens and precepts of women in the village. Ana, wearing a yellow dress in the middle of the green landscape of this mountainous village, searches for prince charming. (Rui Mendes)
Ana lives in Paris but every summer she goes to a small village called Bustarenga in the interior of Portugal. She is 36 years old and single. What follows is a reflection on finding love through the lens and precepts of women in the village. Ana, wearing a yellow dress in the middle of the green landscape of this mountainous village, searches for prince charming. (Rui Mendes)
Maybe Sembène’s masterpiece and one of cinema’s most intense condemnations of colonialism. At the end of WWII, Senegalese soldiers are coming home from Europe and placed in Thiaroye’s military camp. Given the poor conditions they are kept and also the cut in severance pay, the soldiers revolt. The tragedy happens with their massacre at the hands of the French army. Winner of the jury special grand prize in Venice.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
New York, 2020. A city caught in between the prophecies of John Carpenter (They Live; Escape from New York) and Trump’s supposed redemptive power. Skyscrapers point to the sky, but, at the same time, cage up like border walls.
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And on his third short Francisco Valente exchanges Lisbon for New York, fiction for documentary, love for… No, one doesn’t exchange love for anything. But setting it aside for a while now, Valente winks at John Carpenter’s They Live, and with renewed robustness and a rigorous gaze films the city that never sleeps taken by a virus. Or is it two? When the night falls Moon River comforts us. A promise lingers in the air that everything will be all right, somewhere in the future. Skyscrapers will be there to witness to it. (Ana David)
And on his third short Francisco Valente exchanges Lisbon for New York, fiction for documentary, love for… No, one doesn’t exchange love for anything. But setting it aside for a while now, Valente winks at John Carpenter’s They Live, and with renewed robustness and a rigorous gaze films the city that never sleeps taken by a virus. Or is it two? When the night falls Moon River comforts us. A promise lingers in the air that everything will be all right, somewhere in the future. Skyscrapers will be there to witness to it. (Ana David)
Ceddo is the name for the last holders of African spiritualism before the arrival of Islam and Christianity. Set in a Senegalese village in the XVII century, The king Demba War sides with the Islamic leader. The ceddo organise and kidnap his daughter in order to prevent forced religious conversion. This “micro epic”, as it has been described, was censured and, so the story goes, Sembène used to distribute fliers at film theatres describing the removed scenes.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
Nga is a tired and old elephant. Sanra, his faithful guide. This could be the beginning of a Disney film. But no. Is this a slow-motion adventure film? Casas will transform the spectator’s gaze into the impassive and serene look of the elephant. It is a journey where man and animal will look for the mythical elephant cemetery, where Nga can finish his days. But this is above all a cosmological film about death, reincarnation and the hypothesis of the non-human.
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Cemetery follows the path of Nga, a Sri Lankan elephant who begins a journey to the sacred elephant cemetery, as planet Earth collapses at the hand of natural catastrophes. In a slow-motion adventure, nature ceases to be the backdrop of human life, and becomes the sensitive, thinking entity that communicates through the sound and visual matter of the film. The radio reports that a violent earthquake has devastated Asia, killing thousands of people. From here, the film begins a three-part journey towards a cosmological understanding of space after the calamity and the consequent extinction of species. Finding the elephant cemetery, plunging into darkness, means starting a kind of rebirth. Themes such as death, reincarnation, immortality are addressed, but also memory, colonialism and the collapse of civilization.
Cemetery is an odyssey about the unknown, the unexplored, this elephant cemetery – perhaps a kind of shangri la. (Inês Lima Torres)
Holem Wood is a housing estate in the north of England, built in the 50’s in order to supply homes for the working-class people. With the years it became an isolated place. There lives Tyler, a 16-year-old boy who has never attended school.
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In a low-cost housing complex in the north of England, children spend most of their time on the street, growing up together and learning to face the adversities of a life of exclusion. In this portrait of childhood there are no adults and the rules are defined by other hierarchies. There is no restraint in joy or revolt. A childhood on the edge that does not anticipate a better future. (Margarida Moz)
In a low-cost housing complex in the north of England, children spend most of their time on the street, growing up together and learning to face the adversities of a life of exclusion. In this portrait of childhood there are no adults and the rules are defined by other hierarchies. There is no restraint in joy or revolt. A childhood on the edge that does not anticipate a better future. (Margarida Moz)
Caio Soares defines his film as a “queer-camp science-fiction web series” that tries to explore the dynamics of the small collective structures. In other words, five friends build a spaceship and start to look for Club Splendida, somewhere in space.
Communicating vessels. A phenomenon in which liquid fills connected containers to the same level, despite its differences in shape. Prized at Rotterdam Film Festival, this film applies the idea to human relationships, in particular teacher and student.
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Based on the works by Dennis Oppenheim, Lygia Clark and Joan Jonas, the film recounts the experience of an experimental film teacher with a female student, interested in performing for the camera. A sweet voice describes and analyzes the result of the exercises, going through a critical history of the beginnings of video performance. Everything becomes more complex when the gestures themselves become a sophisticated metaphor for interpersonal relationships, the teaching of the arts, parenting, alterity and the very act of seeing and … of being. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Based on the works by Dennis Oppenheim, Lygia Clark and Joan Jonas, the film recounts the experience of an experimental film teacher with a female student, interested in performing for the camera. A sweet voice describes and analyzes the result of the exercises, going through a critical history of the beginnings of video performance. Everything becomes more complex when the gestures themselves become a sophisticated metaphor for interpersonal relationships, the teaching of the arts, parenting, alterity and the very act of seeing and … of being. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Rappaport’s new fictional autobiography (The Double Life of Paul Henreid; Chris Olsen – The Boy Who Cried, IndieLisboa 2018) is about the German actor Conrad Veidt. When we think of Veidt, the first image that comes to mind is of the somnambulist Cesare, in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920). However, Veidt had a career until the end of silent film and in the talkies he tried to free himself from the stereotype of the German villain.
A small shadow play. The family directs the director. The filmmaker turned projection screen reveals us, through cinema, the relationship with her family. Person and shadow, shot reverse shot, the surrounding everyday moulds us and, in turn, burns and transforms.
The death of the queen left the court empty of feminine presences for several years. Between a cup of tea and a irony as sharp as a saber end, Corte is a chess game involving a murder and a birth, a fight for the succession to the throne.
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In “Corte”, the Rapazote twins send the traditional historic film to a place where the sun doesn’t shine. A royal palace intrigue, a “whodunnit”, a masterfully directed set of actors, a very well-written script and a hats-off to the dialogues. The duo does everything well, risking being a very serious case in Portuguese cinema. For more than 10 years, whoever paid attention to filmmakers from ESTC knows that the future of Portuguese cinema is theirs. And these reckless twins from Viseu turn the impossible into their normality. (Miguel Valverde)
In “Corte”, the Rapazote twins send the traditional historic film to a place where the sun doesn’t shine. A royal palace intrigue, a “whodunnit”, a masterfully directed set of actors, a very well-written script and a hats-off to the dialogues. The duo does everything well, risking being a very serious case in Portuguese cinema. For more than 10 years, whoever paid attention to filmmakers from ESTC knows that the future of Portuguese cinema is theirs. And these reckless twins from Viseu turn the impossible into their normality. (Miguel Valverde)
Many times in cinema the decisive moment takes place in a blink of an eye. A few seconds. Time enough for beauty to install itself. Clouds are the natural shutter.
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Within seconds, a cloud crosses a field of daisies. The spring image is startled by the passage of darkness. So brief, so fleeting, so insignificant. It is in this passage that a 16mm poem is formed. (Margarida Moz)
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Within seconds, a cloud crosses a field of daisies. The spring image is startled by the passage of darkness. So brief, so fleeting, so insignificant. It is in this passage that a 16mm poem is formed. (Margarida Moz)
There comes the day when our online love has to turn offline. That happened to Danny that met his virtual girlfriend for the first time and things didn’t come out quite as he expected.
While bombs fell in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, civilians were hiding in their caves until hell was over. Tim Alsiofi was one of them and, with the help of his camera and poetry, was trying to survive and express himself.
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Douma is a city in Syria, near Damascus, which we often see in the news due to frequent bombings. More than the bang of the bombs, what shudders in this film is our interior. We see the trivialization of bombing for people living in Douma. The way it is normal for them that day to day, what they do in the waiting times between two attacks and the way they face and relativize the whole situation. Filmed in the first person, this film moves away from war reporting. Here everything is more raw, more skin-deep, more urgent. (Carlos Ramos)
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Douma is a city in Syria, near Damascus, which we often see in the news due to frequent bombings. More than the bang of the bombs, what shudders in this film is our interior. We see the trivialization of bombing for people living in Douma. The way it is normal for them that day to day, what they do in the waiting times between two attacks and the way they face and relativize the whole situation. Filmed in the first person, this film moves away from war reporting. Here everything is more raw, more skin-deep, more urgent. (Carlos Ramos)
After Pontypool or This Movie Is Broken (IndieLisboa 2011), the dystopian humour and the violent coolness of Bruce McDonald are back. In this dreamland, modern vampires are face to face with jazz legends, and pinkie fingers are a “good” almost as precious as innocent girls for wild wedding parties. The genius Stephen McHattie, backed by Juliette Lewis and Henry Rollins, are the actors in this bloody modern fairy-tale.
The filmmakers couple, founders of the militant collective Class Cinema Collective, analyses in this film-essay the role of the press in the Spanish dictatorship in the 70’s. A fight for the control of information and the need to find trustworthy sources.