What will happen when we know we’re going to die? Will light change? Will birds sing more intensely? Death comes to inhabit the relationship of two women, together for a long time. One is terminally ill, the other will stay and should nurse. The days go by in an atmosphere of goodbye. In a small house in the woods the love of the couple remains, their talks, the touch of their bodies, memory. But, inexorably, despair is digging deep in close up faces.
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Two real women, two faces, a kiss, a hug. This demonstration of absolute love throws Torres Lleiva’s film into a torrent of emotions. We perceive a constant mal à l’aise that contaminates the relationship but we don’t know why. We are invited into the middle of a relationship as confidants. From this moment on, we realize that it was a disease that installed a “thing” that kills and will not disappear. And this is where everything adjusts, with advances and setbacks, as is typical of uncertainty. There are very few films that create knots that do not untie, but with tenderness allow any glimpse to be a lifeline. And that is why the film includes stories from other times that help us to understand its present. Lleiva’s is full of faces and exhausted bodies, showing that even in pain it is possible to show sensuality. Vendrá la muerte and tendrá tus ojos is one of those films where you feel like staying for all eternity. (Miguel Valverde)
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How to go through a complicated year? Maybe film it. Mario Valero directs a travel journal, between cities and faces, a life condensed in Mini VD, a diary of the seasons, a detour.
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A travel, journal-like film, where Mario Valero sees friendship and nature as equal forces; a gesture of re-learning how to shoot and edit. The world is presented to us as a place where all ideas and connections are possible and work as a tool to simultaneously remind and forget the days, the faces, and the seasons, that metamorphose and get blurry and confusing. (Duarte Coimbra)
Um dia João, jovem adolescente, decide não regressar a casa. Porque lá moram uma mãe infeliz e um pai ausente. Com Carlotto Cotta. Produzido por Luís Galvão Telles e Justin Amorim.
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Crescer não é fácil, é um verdadeiro, (de verdade), grande cliché, ao qual não escapa o ‘moço’ desta história. Descobrir as actividades extra amorosas da progenitora, deixa-o num território de emoções confusas. Resta assimilar o jogo que está lá fora, a cumplicidade com os amigos, a bicicleta, um mergulho nas águas, um café nocturno; eis a fuga de um rapaz que está pronto a crescer. Um quadro narrativo delicado e sensível que segue o moço, observa-o, acompanha-o, e não o perderá de vista. (Carlota Gonçalves)
Censorship in cinema aimed at producing cuts or an opacity in the images of certain films, due to political and moral reasons. Accessing letters from censors of the French cinema of the 1950’s, 1960s and 1970s, one imagines what might be an “aesthetic of censorship.”
Fimed in 16mm, Camilo Restrepo’s first feature film (La impresión de una guerra, IndieLisboa 2016 e Cilaos, IndieLisboa 2017) is an escape, an hallucination and a fever. Pinky runs away from a sect and takes refuge in a factory of illegal t-shirts. There is a hypnotic journey to be made between corridors, paints, slogans and guns. The aim is liberation. A cinema that dreams of another Colombia: without oppression, corruption or religious instrumentalization.
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A survivor escapes from his religious sect and finds it hard to blend into the outside world, still imbued with the violence he witnessed and instigated. For his first feature film, Colombian director Camilo Restrepo is inspired by the true story of his friend Luis Felipe Lozano, “Pinky”, who plays his own role in Los conductos. It is a film inhabited by violence, a philosophical and supernatural tale taking us to the limits of the instrumentalization of religion and widespread violence in Colombia. It is a cathartic film that Restrepo offers to his friend, in a form of docu-fiction filmed in 16 mm, The film captures many symbols, as well as a certain theatricality to best represent Pinky’s internal emotions, in a fragmented montage. Between realistic passages and scary projections, Pinky’s journey is not an easy one. After the murder, supposed to free him from his indoctrination, his anger remains in a world which refuses to open its doors to him. Various historical or literary figures from Colombian culture visit him to confront him with the moral dilemmas he faces. Because if in our reality the murder never took place, in that of Los conductos, it questions fluid concepts like Good and Evil, which Pinky has trouble conceiving since for so many years he thought he was “Chosen”. (Mickael Gaspar)
This is some sort of a love triangle between a man, a woman and a meat grinder. Or as sometimes love can be messy.
Ariel de Bigault’s work has been connected to the routes of the Lusophone World. In Fantasmas do Império we are guided by the saotomean actor Angelo Torres through some works of the Portuguese cinema that explored its colonial past. Some directors as Fernando Matos Silva, João Botelho or Margarida Cardoso help to understand imperialism, colonialism, and propaganda seen through the “family album” which is the Portuguese cinematic collective imaginary.
During WWII, French colonialist forces from Vichy’s government requested the most precious good in the Senegalese village of Efock: rice. The ethnical minority of the Diola organise for resistance: while traditional elders pray to Emitaï, the God of thunder, the women, more practical, hide the crops. This silent resistance story was censured for 5 years after its release in all francophone Africa.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
After a long career as a cinema actress, Buisel started directing in 2017 with Quantas Vezes Tem Sonhado Comigo? (IndieLisboa 2018). Now she adapts once more Fernando Pessoa, a short story about a hunchback that writes a letter to her loved one.
Ahh… the American suburbs with all its strange rituals. DeBoer and Luebbe – screenwriters, directors and actresses in the film – crafted this world inhabited by fierce soccer moms, adults wearing braces, matching pink and blue outfits, baby exchanges, little dogs and babies, golf carts and football matches. In this delicious dark comedy in cheerful colours, it is as if David Lynch mated with Wes Anderson to give birth to this film.
Quando faz muito calor a melhor coisa a fazer é entrar numa gelataria e pedir um geladinho. Mas há pessoas com olhares bem escaldantes.
What does it mean to (still) believe in the revolutionary power of cinema? Four friends get together in a countryside estate to recreate parts of political iconic works like Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) or Faroccki’s Nicht löschbares Feuer (1969). After Leones (Indielisboa 2013), her first feature, Jazmín López elliptic style is back. We never know where the sound comes from or where the camera will go. Rui Poças is the director of photography.
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Considered one of the most promising voices in Argentina, Jazmín López (director of the incredible Leones shown in competition at IndieLisboa 2013) returns with this film in which four friends gather in a country house to reenact three iconic revolutionary works from the end of the 60’s: Godard’s La chinoise, Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire and the performance that resulted in a series of photographs, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) by Ana Mendieta. What could be a rational work here is an inventive and full of life film (conversations run over and let themselves slide between interpretation and reinterpretation), invoking the inspiring power of music that underlines what cannot be forgotten, calling for long travellings through the rooms of the house and its exterior, will a brilliant cinematography signed by Rui Poças) giving it monumentality. (Miguel Valverde)
Fifteen dancers tour the piece Crowd by the choreographer Gisèle Vienne. The stage is a dance floor, in homage to the 90’s raves. Erotic impulses, random encounters, love in super slow motion. The director documents their work, but suddenly dance falls into cinema’s creative pit. And the boundaries – between bodies, relationships, stage and reality – become more and more fluid, in this journey through love, dance and the night.
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If it Were Love is not just an exceptional opportunity, for those who missed it in Lisbon, to get to know the work of choreographer Gisèle Vienne in Crowd. Perhaps it is even more valuable as a thorough revisiting of its characters and movements, in a brilliant system built by Patric Chia, who directs the viewer’s gaze to a confusion between reality and fiction, when filming the dancers but also the backstage conversations. The film is responsible for the same trance in which the characters are on stage, to the sound of 90’s rave music, and nobody wishes to break free. Patric Chia continues to explore the world of the deepest human emotions, in its authentic and performative dimensions, with a clearly expressive and unique authorial language. (Mafalda Melo)
Two years after the abolition of Section 175 of the German criminal code, which criminalized homosexual acts, Praunheim’s film became a fundamental work for political cinema. It triggered society debates on the visibility of gay culture and movements for its liberation in several countries. The film shows Daniel leaving the countryside for the city and his passage through different gay subcultures. And we hear voices that were in silence until then.
Jacob lives in the city and dreams of becoming an architect like his father. One day, when his dad has to go away for work, Jacob spends the week with his cousin Mimmi and her father. They live in the suburbs of Riga, Latvia’s capital. There everything seems different and calmer. When the boys realise the local park will be replaced by skyscrapers, they will try to stop the construction. And they will get precious help from a pack of special dogs.
Joan D’Arc is a symbol of occidental spirituality and of a certain social French psyche. In 2017, Dumont directed Jeannette, l’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc, a musical based on a play by Charles Péguy. Jeanne is the sequel that recuperates from the first film the 10-year-old Lise Prudhomme for the role of Joan. We are not in historical realism here, but in the modernisation of a myth from an ever-renewing childhood, from a freed female condition.
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Bruno Dumont again adapts the texts by Charles Péguy devoted to the historical figure of Jeanne D’Arc. It is 1429, Jeanne is imprisoned and tried. After a dancing and carefree Jeannette, this second part seems more austere and more theatrical but it proves to be more sensitive and majestic. The expression of the body gives way to the expression of the verb. This film is no longer frankly a comedy, like the filmmakers’ works since the series Le P’tit Quinquin. The filmmaker seems to revive the sobriety of the past, and chooses to report on events (a war, a trial, a church) only using a voice, whether it is a comment (characters are like the radio hosts of the action), an interrogation, or a song. These oratorical jousts become fascinating and succeed in replacing the actionby force of evocation. Each word, interpreted with fragility by non-professional actors, has its singular tone and phrasing. Bringing a completely Brechtian distance, this vocal game does not preserve less the mystery of Jeanne and our fascination. The filmmaker then questions our relationship to spirituality. The profane and the sacred mix, in the image of the singer Christophe, an improbable guest of Dumont’s cinema. (Mickael Gaspar)
Developed over a decade, the first feature of the animator Mariusz Wilczyński shows us well this hurtful and raw recollection. The city of Lodz has a Beckettian and autobiographical atmosphere. An industrial space, filled with smoke, strong rough lights, bizarre characters. The tragic and satirical episodes, like the death and preparation for the funeral of his mother’s corpse, inhabit the labyrinthic memory of the filmmaker.
The Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, author of unforgettable soundtracks such as those of Sicario (2015) or Arrival (2016), worked on his debut feature film, when we left us too soon in 2018. Filmed in 16 mm., black and white, Jóhannsson imagines a futuristic world, solitary and beautiful, in which the human race is making way to the monuments of its presence. Narrated by the actress Tilda Swinton, this is a singular and Kubrickesque visual and sonorous voyage.
