To see with one’s hands. A picture was taken by someone on the day of Tunisia’s independence, in 1956. Awarded at Rotterdam, this film shows us that image, opaque in the light, but revealed, piece by piece, by the choreography and movement of the hands.
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A film that unfolds through the magical and exploratory touch of the image as a piece, where hands become living shadows, revealing more image that is also memory, allowing us to discover human figures and advancing back in time. Permeable image, transparent, highly sensitive to gesture; a gesture that will create the intimacy of a brief, delicate and singularly haptic moment: “To touch is to see”, as Ismaïl Bahri tells us. (Carlota Gonçalves)
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VanLoo filmed Schwarzenegger in the 1970’s in a bodybuilding contest. The original 16mm material was used in an art installation that is now lost. The images remained, with the poses, no sound, and the human living sculpture gaining a new power with the passing of time.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger – The Art of Bodybuilding consists of unseen images shot in 16mm by Babeth van Loo during the Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding contest in 1976. It’s a reflection on the relation of the physical body and art. Arnold sculpts his own body to match the ideals of the male body imagined by the renaissance artists, therefore he becomes art himself. Unfiltered but carefully sculpted art to be something as ephemeral as it is eternal. (Rui Mendes)
All animals do sports but then it’s up to the elephant to tidy up the gym. How we would like to be a basketball champion…
Chloé Terren’s graduation film is a mix between Rear Window in times of gentrification, with a familiar love story. Raphaël is taking care of his grandmother’s apartment, while she stays in a nursing home and has to decide whether to tell her the truth or not.
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The square windows, with rounded corners, of the Aillaud Towers show us a dawning Paris. But they also show us the inside of Oda’s apartment, Rafaël’s grandmother, who takes care of the house while she is away. They also show us the daily affairs of Oda’s neighbours that Rafaël unveils. Or perhaps the adventures he imagines, to comfort her. (Ana Cabral Martins)
This was the day when diagrams got mad, graphics started to dance and the age pyramids got really hot. Gehrig ironizes about the normative power of statistics and the efficient Powerpoint presentations.
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Let that who never dozed off during a PowerPoint presentation be the first one to cast a stone. What happens when the statistical diagrams themselves get bored to death? A short film of sensual curves and an above-average sense of humour. (Ana David)
Balada de um Batráquio (IndieLisboa 2016) gave Leonor Tales the Golden Bear for best short film in Berlin. A personal political gesture against the prejudice towards the romani community, that relocated Portuguese cinema in the search for justice and change.
Bex, Lili, Fox, Tru e Milo are five gender-creative kids each engaged in shaping their own sense of what it means to be fully human. And to do it means dealing with bullies, explaining themselves to their parents, or navigating the uncharted waters of relationships.
A French-Vietnamese director deserts the movie set where she was filming a version of Dangerous Liaisons by Laclos, to board a ghost ship. After Atlantiques, Diop wins again best short film at Rotterdam Festival with this fantasy.
Billie Holiday is a North American jazz legend. At the end of the sixties, while preparing a biography that was actually never written, the journalist Lipnack Kuehl taped more than 200 hours of interviews with other musicians, but also family members, friends and lovers of the singer. James Erskine accesses this material to direct a film about her life, while restoring key performances and other archive footage into colour for the first time.
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We know how the story goes. It is, after all, of one of the voices of the XXst century that we are talking, the woman who carried jazz’s history within herself and turned that knowledge into the expression of a life of artistic glory and private turmoil. Billie Holiday, born in 1915 and taken away by a life of abuses and excesses in 1959, at 44 years of age, was admired by Duke Ellington, a decisive influence in Frank Sinatra, a troubled reflection of the transparent Ella Fitzgerald.
Starting in 1970, journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who was aware of all that, devoted nine years of her life to know more. Aiming towards the writing of a biography, she amassed 200 hours of interviews with friends, lovers, agents, family members or musicians like Count Basie or Sarah Vaughn. Linda Kuehl, who truly is the other main character here, died in tragic circumstances before concluding her book. Seeing the words she recorded grouped together with the enlightening archival footage, her work becomes somehow fulfilled. “Bilie” is the full portrait. (Mário Lopes)
The oldest search in the world, a quest for happiness and knowledge. In this animation that invokes the aesthetics of the early video games, we follow the adventures of a pixelated little man that looks for spiritual consolation near a wise lion.
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In a world that looks like a videogame from a bygone era a boy wakes up and does not feel happiness. He does not know why and does not know what he can do to feel happy. He goes on an adventure with his dog, not unlike Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and finds anthropomorphic animals on his way to meet the Wise Lion. In a universe without distinct rules the boy searches for meaning in the most universal of questions that nobody really knows the answer. (Rui Mendes)
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The life of Rok Ajulu, a Kenian professor and activist, was an adventure film and a life of struggle against apartheid. His daughter pays him homage using 16mm, VHS, DV formats to capture many of the places that turned him into a freedom fighter hero.
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These are essential conversations whose meaning is revealed over time. Stories, laughter and silences recover a relationship that life has discontinued. Meeting in Kisumu, the daughter discovers the connection between her father, with whom she never had a close relationship, and the political activist he was, and the one who determined the separation between the two. In this film, the history of Africa and that of the family merge, testifying that what separates father and daughter does not revoke the complicity of the dialogue. (Margarida Moz)
The artistic collaboration Bambitchell explores, between fiction, fact and essay, a number of medieval trials were animals and inanimate objects were accused of different crimes such as trespassing, thievery or murder.
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The subject is legal, and the approach is methodical and impartial. The Bambitchell duo proposes a playful historiography of animals, pests and objects’ trials. Their mise en scène of ironic detachment exposes the contradictions of personifying the rights and duties of creatures. As the ridicule of the sentences becomes evident, the film reveals unexpected solutions: the editing, the graphics, the ovoid compositions, the musical soundtrack and the demonic invocations reflect on the flaws inherent to the sciences of law. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
A short about Ingmar Bergman’s power, sexuality and a facial lipoma that gives him no rest.
In the midst of nature, between tears and watermelon juice, Barbara will heal old wounds and redefine her sexuality.
Several bottles of wine later, three girls roll out of a car and into a nightclub.
Two bored extras from the ‘Tristan and Isolde’ opera roam the underground of the Garnier Palace.
The avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov was also an untiring promoter of the cause of women’s emancipation.
João lives in São Paulo. He goes through a series of encounters with people like his long-time friend Irene; his boyfriend Álvaro; Matias, a young man he meets in the subway and has a sexual experience with, among others, some acquainted, some unknown.
