Made in VHS and with YouTube images, this is a story of a sympathetic serial killer: a jaguar named Valerio. When he escaped the New Orleans zoo, he killed several animals. After being captured he decides to make a video diary for his significant other.
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Valerio is one of two jaguars in a zoo. One day he escapes and goes one a killing spree. He kills five alpacas, three foxes and one emu before being captured and sedated. In this sedated state Valerio makes a video diary to his significant other, the other jaguar named Lula. Valerio misses Lula and hopes to see her again. (Rui Mendes)
In the Mojave Desert lies the unfinished city of California, planned in the sixties to receive thousands of inhabitants, like Los Angeles or San Diego. Today, in the middle of empty streets, the city has a few more than 10000 thousand people. The trio of Belgian directors follows these new pioneers, that look for new beginnings, telling about their experiences, giving names to streets or making long walking journeys of exploration of the space.
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At a certain point in Victoria, its protagonist Lashay T. Warren films himself in front of a busted pipe in the street, gushing water. In the image he captures, at a certain point, he is able to find a rainbow and tells us: “look at a bad thing you can still get a rainbow”. This could well be the motto of this chronicler of desolation, a new pioneer, who in 2016 went to live with his family to Cal City. Today it is an unfinished city in the middle of the desert, because the plan made in the sixties to transform that place in a residence for thousands of people was abandoned. Warren and his work colleagues use their phones as compasses to identify the streets and keep the tracks clean. Visits to L.A. are now only made through Google Maps. The directors Benoot, De Ceulaer and Tollenaere aim to reflect on the subtle processes of racial and spatial segregation, but also on the creative potential of a space of which we are discoverers. (Carlos Natálio)
There is nothing like being cosy at our home. Not always. A young couple was looking for the perfect home. And it seemed they had found it. But then suddenly they realised they were trapped inside the new labyrinth-like neighbourhood, composed of equally perfect houses. This science fiction thriller film, staring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, is a reflection about what it really means to have your dream home and build a family.
Awarded in 2018 at IndieLisboa, with Waste No.5 the Raft of the Medusa, the artist returns to the festival with his Waste series, a reflection on the human production of waste. This time with a particular look at digital technologies and its paradoxes.
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What if waste suddenly became huge? When we discover that underneath an orthodox church (in Helsinki) there is a world data server, which uses recycled water to cool itself, we confirm that nothing is what it seems. From here we start a trip around the world, passing through South Korea, Ghana and Turkey. The constant exclamation “How Great” becomes part of our lexicon, to amaze us, always. The world seen through the evocation of waste can only make the world alert. Come back Greta! (Miguel Valverde)
In the years after Senegal’s independence, the western influence is still a reality. A greedy businessman profits from the situation and marries a third wife as proof of his success. But when he tries to consummate marriage, he is afflicted with a xala, a curse that renders its victims impotent. Based on his novel with the same name, Sembène directs a symbolic satire about the social and political impotence of his country.
Once there was a young woman that wanted to reduce her titties. Her mother was also in need of another facelift. The boyfriend supports everything they want. And so they go to this plastic surgery clinic in the east of Europe. Or, as we call it in the land of horror, a restaurant for zombies. A gore comedy, an orgy of blood and violence that will make you think twice before ordering your steak rare the next time.
How long does it take to read a page of Ulysses, by James Joyce? And on a car trip, how many pages per kilometre? Buchert’s works combine humor, literature and critical reflection. This is just the case in 858 Pages Au Sud, in which the author evokes his father’s death, more than 20 years ago, and tries to beat his old record that involves reading the Irish writer’s classic, a caravan and a literary voyage-performance, heading to the south of Europe.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
In 2014, IndieLisboa programmed the short film Quelqu’un d’extraordinaire, Monia Chokri’s debut work, an actress we know from Xavier Dolan’s films. Her first feature film, an intelligent and hilarious comedy, develops the same theme: the coming of age of a young woman. In this case it’s Sophia (the extraordinary Anne-Élisabeth Bossé), who recently got her PhD degree but doesn’t have bright professional options. She still lives with her older brother, her best friend.
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In 2014 IndieLisboa showed Quelqu’un d’extraordinaire, the directing debut of Monia Chokri, actress in some of Xavier Dolan’s films. Now, her first feature inscribes itself in the tradition of the familiar film from Québec, but also in the subtlety and cosmopolitanism of authors like Noah Baumbach or Greta Gerwig. This is a dramatic comedy about a young woman, not so young anymore, that just got her Ph.D. and finds emotional compensation in the relationship with her brother, due to lack of future perspectives. The constant irony is the weapon for mass good mood, but, by alternating comic and true pain – something that the actress Anne-Élisabeth Bossé dominates perfectly – characters get another kind of life and depth. We are being guided through the happiness clichés, but if La femme de mon frère could just be an intellectual version of Bridget Jones, it turns instead into a sensible film about growing and humility. (Carlos Natálio)
A curious lynx leaves its forest, attracted by the city lights. He has a lot of fun there until he falls asleep in the middle of a parking lot. In the early morning, locals are astonished to find this strange animal covered in snow.
Winner of IndieLisboa in 2014, Mille Soleils is about the return of the director to Senegal to revisit two actors of the film Touki Bouki (1971), directed by her uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty. Real memories, fiction liberties and cinema as family.
Bragança’s fifth feature film (Tragam-me a Cabeça de Carmen M., co-directed with Catarina Wallenstein, IndieLisboa 2019) tries to understand which art is possible under the contradictory ghosts that haunt Brazilian’s identity. Co produced by the Portuguese production house Som e a Fúria, and with the collaboration of João Nicolau in the screenplay, the film follows Fernando, a broke Brazilian director in his journey full of adventures and miracles in search of his memories.
Desire is not a subject for words. It is instead a lightness that weighs on windless afternoons, on wet clothes drying in the sun, on warm water pool baths. At night, insects are drawn to light, because desire is not a subject for words.
Last year, IndieLisboa put up a program called Brazil Entranced with many important names of the emergent new and politically engaged Brazilian cinema, among them Your Bones and Your Eyes by Caetano Gotardo. In 2018 we saw Good Manners by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra. Now, Gotardo and Dutra together give us a story of two families and the hauntings of slavery and colonization, in a São Paulo city at the turn of the twentieth century.
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Maria, a nun, moves forward on dark stairs, a torch in her hand. She is scared, as if something is watching her, lurking in the dark. The scene looks like a pure archetype of horror but nothing, strictly nothing is going to be truly as expected in All the Dead Ones: neither the supernatural film that we imagine, nor the period film that seems so undoubtedly to take form. The feature takes place at a tipping point, in the twilight of the 19th century, during an era of societal change for Brazil. But again, change is not carried out so clearly, in the country as in the rich home of the Soares family. Slavery has been abolished in Brazil for ten years, but what remains of it in social structures, in class relations? For the Soares family, Europe is “the origin of everything”, Africa is a great indistinct magma, the tone is that kind of paternalism that the colonists imagine benevolent and magnanimous. All the Dead Ones observes whiteness and its hegemony in an unprecedented way in a world that seems to be moving forward … but is it really moving? For who? Released a few years ago, Caetano Gotardo’s first feature film was called O Que se Move, literally meaning what moves. This is a title that could have suited this too, in a film where we feel a world in turmoil, but where we also observe another which appears frozen. (Mickael Gaspar)
The painter Ana Marchand always felt a bit dislocated in her family. The love of art and travel, where did she get those from? As a young woman she saw a travel book written by her uncle Maurizio Piscicelli and finally understood. Catarina Mourão (Pelas Sombras, A Toca do Lobo, O Mar Enrola na Areia) follows Ana’s familiar and spiritual journey. Who was Maurizio? Who is Ana? The face of one, the face of the other. Reincarnation are the several lives we live.
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When she was a little girl, Ana saw a book written by her uncle Maurizio in the living room bookshelf. It was a book that narrated his trip to Congo, with photographs that made people dream. Afterwards, she lost track of the book and of the mysterious presence of that relative with whom she would discover to have a lot in common. Already a grownup, Ana will look for traces of Maurizio’s life, as someone searching for a piece of himself. Mourão will accompany this journey with her cinema, itself also an art of the voyage, many times physical ones, and others interior and emotional ones, triggered by photographs and pieces of memorabilia. Ana e Maurizio is a delicate circuit of gazes, a journey through palimpsest and the superposition between times, generations and images. Catarina observes Ana that, in turn, tries to look at what her uncle saw in his trip to Benares, India. Everything changes and nothing changes, we feel the wind of Rossellini’s cinema, but also the crossover of other Catarina’s journeys (Pelas Sombras; A Toca do Lobo). (Carlos Natálio)
Animals watch seals give a perfect, synchronized performance on the trampoline. Hippopotami are the ones paying the most attention because when their turn comes they don’t want to look bad.
Workers of a building site in Senegal’s capital don’t get paid for months. Soulemain, one of them, decides to cross the ocean in search for a better life. 17-year-old Ana, despite being promised to another man, waits for the return of her love. Inspired by the figure of Penelope, but also Romeo and Juliet, Atlantique is a tale of spirits, trauma and growth. Cannes Grand Jury Prize of 2019.
Directed while still attending Le Fresnoy film school, this documentary was the inspiration for the director’s first feature film. A group of Senegalese friends that aspires to cross the ocean, in a journey that may also be between life and death.
