This is a work made from films that the director collected, anonymous or amateur by nature, and which he now uses to design a look that encompasses his own life, his family stories, as well as a (clear) obsession with cinema (and sex). A portrait between fiction and reality, between the endearing and the narcissistic, haunted by past loves but full of joie de vivre.
João Botelho brings Alexandre O’Neill back to the silver screen after Um Adeus Português. In a film with a penchant for the musical and the oneiric, the cast includes Pedro Lacerda, Inês Castel-Branco, Claudio da Silva, Crista Alfaiate, Rita Blanco, Luis Lima Barreto, Soraia Chaves, Joana Santos, Gabriela Barros, Maya Booth, Vera Moura , Maria João Pinho, Dinarte Branco, Pedro Diogo, Isabel Zuaa, Joana Botelho, among others.
Sita Valles was born in Angola, in 1951, but studied Medicine in Lisbon, where she became a communist student leader. After 1974, and because she considered that the revolution in Portugal had no future, she left for Angola and joined the MPLA, the liberation movement. Sita died at the age of 26, in 1977, in circumstances which have not been fully clarified. Testimonies of political figures who crossed paths with her tell us about her life.
This screening will be followed by a debate moderated by Marta Lança.
The narrator is Sara Driver — filmmaker, producer and wife of Jim Jarmusch — who tells the hilarious story of how she smuggled the only copy of the controversial documentary Cocksucker Blues (a film about a tour of the Rolling Stones… for adult eyes only) to the Rotterdam Festival.
No voice and no text, only the power of image and montage. Francisco Noronha builds a portrait of the surroundings of Lisbon as seen by Portuguese cinema, with images from The Green Years by Paulo Rocha (1963) to O Fim do Mundo by Basil da Cunha (2020). In between, there are images of films by Manuel Mozos, João Salaviza and sprinklings of Italian neorealism.
The revolutionary Álvaro Cunhal, symbol of Portuguese communism and political giant of the 20th century. He is nothing less than a larger-than-life figure, now examined by João Botelho’s camera, in a detective-minded film, in which the early years of the life of the historic leader of the Portuguese Communist Party are explored. In between, excerpts from his own books are staged for the spectator.
Maria Lamas became known as a Portuguese feminist political activist, as well as a translator and journalist, who wrote a fundamental work, As Mulheres do Meu País, which intimately and meticulously portrayed the conditions of women in Portugal, in the late 1940s. The film is about the process of writing this book (through the estate, the diaries), but also a reflection on Lamas herself as a figure of Portuguese feminism.
The journey in question is that of Pedro IV of Portugal and Pedro I of Brazil, the king who became known as the “Liberator”, for having given Brazil its independence. We find him returning to the small country by the sea from where he fled from the invading French troops, to now dispute the Portuguese crown with his brother. Tarnished by the glorious past and the uncertain present, he is a man with no place in the world, in search of a new purpose.
A film that walks through Lisbon as a documentary, but what it really wants is to fly over the Tagus River in full fictional mode, in order to explore the south bank, from where it sets off on an adventure from Alentejo to the Algarve. The narrator is Luis Miguel Cintra and the force in motion is Marcello Urgeghe’s fugitive criminal. This screening taks place within the project FILMar, operated by Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, with the finantial support of the EEAGrants 2020-2024 program.
We are in the Italian coastal resort of Rimini, it’s winter and tourists are here because they managed to book a cheap room. Cheering up the ranks of female senior fans is Ritchie Bravo, a past-his-prime lounge singer with an alcohol problem. Everything goes downhill when his mother dies, his dementia-suffering father is alone, and Ritchie’s grown-up daughter demands a sum of money to make up for his abandonment.
In the 1950s, Victor Palla and Manuel Costa, two architect friends, portrayed the city of Lisbon in more than 6000 photographs. These are published in an eponymous book circulated in installments, during Salazar’s regime, but forgotten during the following half century. After their deaths, it became the Portuguese photobook with the greatest international reach ever and this film is a tribute to the work of these two figures, which is now 100 years old.
A lifetime of dreams stored on VHS cassettes. It’s time for an audit, because in this dystopian world not even our dreams are free from the monster of capitalism. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a bit of hope, and a possibility of escape, hidden somewhere in an oneiric landscape. When government agent James Preble (Kentucker Audley) meets artist Arabella “Bella” Isadora (Penny Fuller), that’s exactly what happens: when you open the door to the dream world, a thousand possibilities open up.
In the midst of a heatwave of insanity, two children find a way to cool everyone down! A playful stop motion short film animated using a hybrid technique that includes cut outs, clay animation and thousands of replacement pieces.
Filip Jan Rymsza, who produced The Other Side of the Wind (2018) and Hopper/Welles (2020), wanted to explore the mosquito, considering it humankind’s greatest enemy. The narrative of the film unfolds in August 2007, in a luxurious apartment overlooking New York’s Central Park, where Richard Boca (himself a Wall Street “mosquito”) becomes tormented by creepy occurrences and hordes of those vampiric insects.
The Nasser brothers’ second feature film takes place in contemporary Gaza. At 60, Issa is a curmudgeonly, but secretly charming, solitary fisherman. He is in love with Sihma, a woman who works at the market, but he doesn’t have the courage to tell her. Until the day he discovers a phallic statue of the god Apollo and his life changes. A film that combines absurd comedy, magical realism and the spirit of Italian neo-realism in a unique recipe.
Takumi left Toyama, on the coast of Japan, some time ago. He returns after the death of his father, who never wanted him to leave. He now visits the places and relationships he left behind, with the melancholy of someone who looks differently at what was once familiar.
In this film the spotlight is on Shane MacGowan, the leader of the punk Irish band Pogues. MacGowan turned out to be a difficult character to interview, according to the director, but that made room for the film to portray his irreverence and essence, using archival footage and testimonies from people like his sister, Siobhan, his father, Maurice, and Gerry Adams, the former president of the Sinn Féin political party, in inventive and playful ways.
Who are we? What space is there, for each person, within that word? The RER B train runs through Paris into its suburbs. This is the line where Alice Diop draws isolated portraits that make up a whole. A film-essay that questions a French nation haunted by divisions and fractures whose healing seems complicated. But there is space for gestures that unite human beings, regardless of what separates them.