After being accused of attempted murder, Eldrige Cleaver, militant of the Black Panther Party, is exiled in Algeria. The director and photographer William Klein will make a portrait of a multifaceted man, listening to his activist discourse on revolution, on the American struggle, his own political rivals such as Nixon or Reagan. But this is also a film that goes beyond ideology, a portrait of a romantic revolutionary, in a lyric and moving exile.
Unlike samba or bossanova, Brazilian electronic music has not been gathering too much attention cinemawise. This documentary tries to fill that gap, tracing an historical path that starts with the pioneer experiments of Jocy de Oliveira and Jorge Antunes in the 60’s and goes until today, with the work of musicians like Alexx kidd or Savio Lopes. The film also features the music of some important electronic artists like Anvil FX, Loop B. or Apollo Nove.
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In the 1960s, Jocy de Oliveira and Jorge Antunes had their first experiences in the world of electronic music in Brazil. The two pioneers could not imagine the influence that their compositions would cause in future generations. Over the decades, electronic music became popular and became a lifestyle and a state of mind. While musicians dominate as constantly evolving technologies, they also reflect on the relationship between human and machine. (Mickael Gaspar)
How perfect can a magic car trip through the wonders of the state of Florida be? Acid irony, guided by the pits of Chernyak’s youth memory, where Disney’s sweetness meets vintage TV series such as Benji or Flipper.
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A possible treasure buried in a fictional attic, among other video tapes, that celebrates nothing but the power of cinema to transport us, with a sarcastic smile on its lips. Partly a Disney ride, partly a musical homage to the American state, the neurotic reality of adult life holds hands (and offers an orange juice) with the blindest optimism. For a vacation, or a sabbatical, the easy living is in Florida. (Ana Cabral Martins)
Life is made of cycles and Adriano Mendes’s cinema shows us that. After his first feature O Primeiro Verão (best work in Brand New Section, IndieLisboa 2014) – a warm film about youth beginning the affairs of love and Summer – now it’s time to find a job. 28½ follows a young woman in that search, in a gentrified Lisbon, where need, attraction, sharing and the end of love, all come up at the same time and without warning.
Starting with a photograph that Lei Lei (present in 2016 IndieLisboa with Missing One Player and in 2017 with Books on Books) and his mother took at the end of the eighties, the artist reflects about images as nostalgia archives and fusion of collective and individual memories.
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Analysis of memories that start in a car/set and then grow into real cars, perfect transport objects to revisit time as a true still and moving image experience. Other objects and spaces come together, supporting an impression of time that moves in constant evocation. A film of an analytical and sensitive nature that goes from the personal to the collective, opening us to a beautiful diary full of life. (Carlota Gonçalves)
“How much does a cloud weight?”, asks Lucretius. The roman philosopher has his desire affected by despair, inhabiting the abyss between science and magic. Based on a Marcel Schwob’s short story, Mouramateus crosses, with irony, the classic and the contemporary.
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French symbolist Marcel Schwob wrote, among a series of other semi-autobiographical short stories, about the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. In this anachronistic adaptation of this story, human nature is the obvious target of the philosophy on screen, but it’s the way in which the web of this cinematic narrative is created that surprises by the way it brings us closer to what it shows: not despite of, but due to its artifice. (Ana Cabral Martins)
The duo Francisco Queimadela e Mariana Caló (A Trama e o Círculo, 2015 and Sombra Luminosa, 2018) directs this sensory journey, between documentary and imagination. An encounter with nature, contact and affection, the movement of a familiar circle.
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Bodies, nature, flowers, animals, light and night, awaken a narrative of desire and dream. A film that hangs over things, approaches them, touches them … a film of gestures, hands, melancholic and agitated. Sleeping and awake characters move in a clean landscape of clear and dark desires; Valéry and Bataille, love and eroticism and the bravery of thought. And more ghosts and ancient mirrors of water that collect images. A film that shines, atmospheric, musical, enchanting. (Carlota Gonçalves)
Suddenly a mysterious woman appears in the West of Portugal. Everybody had seen her, but no one knew her. Mother, fairy, angel, owner of a wine business? Lúcia Pires’s (Fauna, 2018) documentary questions confabulation and existence without a proof.
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“It was night and the earth shook, a giant ball that spinned like a disk and inside it the shape of a woman”. One day, many years ago a woman appeared in a wine press of a local producer and blessed that same producer with it’s best harvest. Who is this nameless woman whose description got lost in time? “A Rainha” is a film about the veracity of the storytellers and a reflection on its form as a film. (Rui Mendes)
In the eighties, José Pinhal recorded a couple of cassettes and then he was forgotten. It was only in 2000 that people started to listen to his music again, turning him into a myth of the popular Portuguese music.
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José Pinhal was a stranger in the crowd: a mysterious musician from Santa Cruz do Bispo that only left us a few songs for us to imagine his life. We are left with his delicate word and what, with it, José sings to us: tales of unrequited love for a woman with long hair and red lips. José Pinhal’s repertoire is an endless ode to love, to summer, to forgiveness. If love is endless in his music, José lives now forever in A Vida Dura Muito Pouco, our belated recognition. (Filipa Henriques)
Taken from a train window, Petronin imprinted manually a single image strip, using a shutterless camera, exposing it to a continuous influx of light. The result is the dissolution of the space between frames, elements of landscape losing their solidity.
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Five minutes created from the manipulation of a 35mm photograph, taken during a train journey between Dordrecht and Rotterdam, without the shutter’s help. Photography gains the movement of cinema, absorbing the flow of light. It becomes molten and continuous. Forms lose their definition; they exist between figuration and abstraction. Five minutes that break down the boundaries between cinema, photography and painting. (Ana Cabral Martins)
Num estilo delicado, Moeschler ensaia o regresso de um jovem do campo à sua cidade de origem. O êxtase do reencontro, a possibilidade de recomeço, a amizade e o amor, as ruas nocturnas vazias.
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Num subúrbio francês, onde se pinta um retrato coral da juventude agrilhoada pela economia (há referências aos coletes amarelos, aos entregadores precários, às redes sociais), um rapaz decidiu ser pastor, longe dos mercados e das tecnologias da comunicação. Descreve-se o seu retorno, a um lugar, a uma comunidade a e a uma relação que fora deixada suspensa. A figura do reencontro constitui, portanto, o núcleo de “Abissu”: uma fábula sobre o voltar a olhar, a tocar, a sentir e a beijar um corpo amado. Um “West Side Story” ainda mais cheio de tesão. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Film was Samuel Beckett’s only work for cinema. In it, he wanted to have exterior images of a street, a street he would describe as an “absolute street”. Jan Ijäs shows us the search, in the summer of 1964 in New York, for this “perfect street”.
A noble man is anxiously waiting to finally meet his bride. They are going to have tea together. When she arrives, there is something wrong with her dress. But sometimes the important thing is not to lose face.
Nesta animação de final de curso de Erik Svetoft, os animais estão presos num zoo e servem de entretenimento e humilhação. Cá fora as cores fortes anunciam a destruição da natureza. Um filme de dança e libertação.
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Não fosse este filme ter sido feito antes do confinamento, poder-se-ia especular que era o resultado de muito dias fechado em casa e sob influência de substâncias estranhas. Algen é um filme frenético e divertido, tão bizarro quanto inventivo. Dois animais fogem de uma espécie de jardim zoológico, depois de humilhados pelos visitantes, em busca da liberdade. Dois animais que gostam de dançar. (Carlos Ramos)
Amélia comes to an industrial port. Factories, little boats, the patient water in the night. In an impulse she decides to use one of the boats. But in her own world, there is also the world of others. Namely, of an older fisherman that goes there to work.
It was when studying in UCLA that Luart and some colleagues decided to do this documentary. At its centre we find the philosopher Angela Davis, someone connected to the American Communist Party, to the Black Panthers and an activist for women’s rights and against racial discrimination. We follow her private life as well as political career, in a portrait that became a true revolutionary manifest.
Sometimes cinephilia is finding someone we didn’t expect, while watching a film before sleep. In this case, it was the actress Anna Sten, star of Russian silent film, that appears before Rappaport’s eyes, years later, in a 50’s film by Edward Dmytryk.
The film departs from the collective visual memory made from over 3000 drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari, a native people from Brazil. In these we see a learning process, but also the violence they were subjugated during the military dictatorship
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The drawings made in the ’70s by the Waimiri-Atroari during their literacy process serve as the basis for Apiyemiyekî?. In them, we can see and read the testimonies and reactions of these indigenous people of the Amazon to the violence and atrocities perpetrated against them by the whites during the Brazilian military dictatorship. In a film anchored in the past, reverberating in a present with which it shares too many similarities, Vaz reproduces with intelligence and intention an original listening gesture essential to the understanding of a community. (Ana David)
