Lisboa is dying: bricks replaced doors and windows of old buildings in order not to have access to the forgiveness. It gives to the town an heterogene karma between what lives, what survives and what has been forgiven. Surrounding those broken walls, men and women, as forgiven as the landscape.
‚ÄòArt makes me nuts’ is the way that starts the insightful portrait of the contemporary artists and collector Chong Gon Byun. Marie Losier, with her 16mm camera and all the originality and instinctive style in filmmaking, she creates a brilliantly mature and at the same time naive stop motion on consumerism, where humans and objects co-exist in a dreamy world of dolls and fairies. (Nina Veligradi)
A disturbing portrait of a Brazilian celebration in Sergipe. Since the morning, bodies covered in mud, slide in a ferocious freedom to the forest, to the trees, shouting or in a deadly silence. At night, even the fireworks can be threating to the audience. Us. (Possidónio Cachapa)
A priest tries to fight the temptations of love, but ends up becoming a villain that terrorizes a city. An homage to silent film, this is also a new visit to a film that Conrad Wilhelm Meyersick, a German engineer and filmmaker, made while visiting Guimarães, in 1920. (A. P.)
Inspired by popular cult, O Coveiro is part light part darkness, a bedtime story and almost a nightmare. A child is born and his parents die of fright just to see him. André Gil Mata revisits the traditional Portuguese tale, in a fantastic movie where heads bounce, but you hear a song. (A. P.)
It’s a semi-autobiographical film. The whore is Hollywood and Fassbinder’s film is one the great movies about the making of a movie. Or not: on a film set both the director and the film material are missing. The cast and crew are gathered at a Spanish hotel waiting so they can begin work on a gangster film starring Eddie Constantine. We watch the bunch as they relate in this tense situation. The director’s arrival pushes them towards alienation.
We enter the intimate world of Ely and Nina Bielutine, living in Moscow with a crow, a few cats and the major private-owned collection of Renaissance art (paintings and sculpture). This deeply human portrait marks constant parallels between real and dreamed life, and learns us how art may influence the way you see the world. (Karim Shimsal)
A teenager uses literary forays in search of a meaning, even if it is staged, for her presence in a world that has little or no enthusiasm for her innocent, but convoluted, existential musings.
Classical music requires some formality, but only while playing or rehearsing pieces. In the dorm of a music camp, two violinists awaken and become women in small things. Rose, a twelve-year-old flutist, wants to be like them. A well-constructed narrative about a forced growth in disharmony. (A. P.)
Beginning in a very funny way, this sarcastic animation turns out to be gradually more and more cruel. It describes the long journey from Sahel to Europe through deserts, overcrowded trucks and small traffickers’ boats. And awaits the winners of this absurd lottery. (Karim Shimsal)
After Curling, screened at IndieLisboa 2011, Denis Côté surprises us again with yet another extraordinary film, proving that his filmography is that of an unavoidable filmmaker. Bestiare is a documentary that observes the animals at a Zoo and their relationship with the space where they are and the people visiting, as the seasons change. The images of an accurate contemporary aesthetics make this film a greater work, to which one wishes to return. Images that make us reflect about the act of observing and being observed. (Catarina Cabral)
A man films, as usual for himself, another man undressing. In that moment, he believes in the words of Bethânia’s song, which speaks about loneliness deep inside destiny. But something might be born. There, in the midst of these sex solitudes. A fiction that shows the simplicity of love and relationships within São Paulo’s LGBT community. (P. C.)
The river Narmada was born out of a trance of the god Shiva. The construction of a gigantic damp complex on the river is destabilizing entire communities , displacing them, impeding them to feed, cultivate or destroying their villages. Technology turns out to be a repression tool to impose the new gods of modernity at all costs. (K. S.)
A smart cookie, a dreamer, a simple man and a lazy one live together during the pre-civilization period. With an accurate vision of cinema, the director uses pessimism and sense of humour to show us that man always stays like himself, no matter how many changes he makes in the world. And it ends in style. (Miguel Valverde)
On camera interviews from various people with one common denominator, plastical surgery. Their reasons and motives to be beautiful vary and each person is trying to describe their way of thinking in relation to their decision to impose on their natural looks. A constant quest for beauty through a manufactured and comescialized perception of outer beauty, especially the way it is being handled by the westernize world. Breast enlargement with silicone implants or breast reduction, face lift, liposuction, rhinoplasty, cheek augmentation, bottox are only some of the body restorations mentioned to this highly investigative documentary presenting both the addiction in becoming more and more beautiful with all the superficiality that surrounds the issue and the need for medical treatment. (Nina Veligradi)
Noelia seeks a mother, like a character seeks its author. From mother to mother we enter an absurd universe, accompanied by Noelia’s camera, which can be so inconvenient that at times leads us to despair. The actress of La Niña Santa has grown and shows us that a good idea is an excellent starting point for an intriguing and fun film. (M. V.)
The sound (of silence) and the visual treatment of the peculiar atmosphere of this devastated city in Russia where Nadya, 14, lives, are the elements that transport us to an almost completely different planet. The opinion of a geologist helps Nadya decide her future. (A. P.)
A poetic approach to the acts of growing up, growing to and growing into… This animation from Julia Pott takes us into all those states. What to do with an awkward body when you’re a teenager? The time where a friend becomes everything just before he got stuck at the bottom of ones personal deep ocean. (Possidónio Cachapa)