In 2017, the director Louis Henderson and the producer Olivier Marboeuf went to Haiti to work with a group of artists on the translation to Haitian Creole and the rehearsing of a play. This was Édouard Glissant’s “Monsieur Toussaint”, about the last days of the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture. From this work, as well as improvisation moments, the film was born. A shared authorship work of resurrection and historical redemption.
—
Toussaint Louverture was the great leader of the Haitian revolution. He was decisive for the independence of the country that took place already after his death, becoming the first black independent republic of the Americas. In the promise of that revolution what Haiti is there today? How do young people in the country feel the responsibility of the Haitian hero descendancy? In a collective, polyphonic film, inhabited by hallucination and promise of future, the theatre group The Living and the Dead Ensemble translates into Haitian Creole and stages Édouard Glissant’s play “Monsieur Toussaint”. This is about Louverture’s last days locked in his cell in the Jura Mountains, in the Alps, haunted by ghosts of the revolutionary past. But the most important Haitian literary and culture figure is the spiral. Therefore, the film writes itself and pours from every place. And the characters of Haitian historical pantheon come to haunt the actors who work and live the play in Port-au-Prince. (Carlos Natálio)
In a Philippine school young women learn how to do domestic chores and to babysit. Their goal is to be hired and work abroad in their bosses’ households. But they learn more. They have to know how to deal with sexual, verbal and physical abuse. And how to resist being far from their loved ones. This is a film that addresses female condition, as well as modern slavery in a globalised world.
—
Overseas is an exceptional portrait of class, gender, human condition, in which we get to know the reality of some of the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW’s). Sung-A Yoon manages to translate everything that Filipino women are subjected to when they agree to work overseas, going to the homes of people who they’ve only met at phone or skype interviews. To achieve this goal, they face rigorous training to prepare for separation from their families and against any aggression – physical and verbal – such is the certainty that this is a likely scenario. They must withstand a period of at least two years without giving up. These women will join the 10 million Filipinos overseas: another film would not describe this tale of modern slavery any better. Sung-A Yoon keeps the stoicism of these women intact, in a humanistic and delicate film, an unmissable surprise. (Mafalda Melo)
When we are in a hurry it seems that everything is slower. This afternoon Mathieu’s father is picking him up at the nursery school. But what if his old green car doesn’t start?
In 1970, members of the Pan Africanist Congress formed a cinematographic collective. A group of South Africans exiled in London used archive images and videos secretly filmed in their country to direct one of the first films about the Apartheid regime.
A young girl returns to her home in Barcelona, but she hardly recognised the places due to the effects of tourism. She walks through the neighbourhood like in a dream. Her old apartment, the one where she lived a past love, is now an Airbnb rental.
—
Love in times of gentrification. Anna returns to Barcelona for a few days. Walking the neighborhood where she once lived a great love, it becomes inevitable to succumb to memories of that place, now adulterated by the tourist invasion. A narrative that uses the idea of magic realism with a charm that recalls the cinema of Hong Sang-soo. (Duarte Coimbra)
The small chick called Prince Ki-Ki-Do lives on top of a stone tower in a dark forest. He’s as small as Calimero but as strong as Hercules. When the forest is in trouble, there he goes to help, with his two companions, tiger mosquitoes Tine and Bine.
If the world was just a question of having muscles and being fit, we needed to use our imagination to be able to train in all our daily activities.
In Serra do Açor, Rafael Toral’s family works on the land. In particular, a task of renovation, after a devastating fire. Regada is an experience of immersion in the elements, everything lived through the senses, in a sonorous and visual landscape.
—
Water, fire, earth, air, green, brown, slug, dog, night, light. Francisco Janes’ work, marked by North American experimental cinema (he studied at CalArts), evokes the here and now of Peter Hutton’s landscape, the daily pictorialism of Nathaniel Dorsky and Paul Clipson’s natural symphonies. The result is an ode to the textures of nature (and digital medium), in a friendly confrontation with the abstractions of purely cinematic gaze. “Regada” crystallizes Janes’ intermediate path in the lyricism of labor and in the elements’ hypnotic becoming. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
A businessman has to face the difficult moments after the death of his father. Inner demons, non-resolved emotions, deserted spaces.
In 2014, a guy appeared on stage in colourful shorts, for an artistic performance during Sensible Soccers concert, at the Paredes de Coura festival. Since then he was never forgotten. But who is he? Ricardo is a mockumentary about Ricardo.
—
Who is Ricardo? We don’t know much, although he is known as the guy in the colorful shorts. The story goes that in 2014 he appeared on stage in colorful shorts, for an artistic performance during a Sensible Soccers concert at the Paredes de Coura festival. Since then he has never been forgotten. Ricardo is a mockumentary about Ricardo Bueno and the drama of forgetting your dance moves. Suffering for you, Ricardo. (Carlos Ramos)
“The Devil, a baby and other animals get together to celebrate something, after having died.” This is the way dos Santos describes his first cinematic work. A stupefaction ritual, an experimentation cycle, two and a half minutes about what lives and dies.
Vernier is a great ironic observer. After a workshop with students at the Geneva University of Art and Design, the director went into the swiss night and filmed the conversations of a rich and extravagant youth, in a portrait of vanity and ostentation.
—
Empty time, young time, champagne flows and the conversations come out as light lines of coke that disappear in the laughter of young friends who gather in Geneva. To boast is a natural figure that feeds the tone and ‘’to have” is just a consequence to enjoy. Chic and select, they swing in their golden cages surrendered to the fruition game. The night is theirs. (Carlota Gonçalves)
The memory of love has a certain glow. It also possesses the sound of sea, the chirping of birds, a past disguised as apparition. On a sunny afternoon, Peter reencounters Ines.
—
In a summery afternoon, Pierre and Bastian meet for a coffee by-the-sea. Their meeting makes an old love resurface. In a journey through the past, between a mysterious forest and a captivating sea, will Pierre and Inès see a future? (Duarte Coimbra)
Rita Macedo (Implausible Things; This Particular Nowhere – IndieLisboa 2014 and 2015) lived in the nineties in Macau with her family. With a reflexive look, the filmmaker unites her memory and History. Both moments of the same finitude and transformation.
—
It could be said that Rita Macedo’s new film collides with her previous work. In fact, the confessional voice over and the use of images from home films belong to an essayistic intimacy that was unprecedented in her films. Nevertheless, her view remains intact: the fusion of ideas in the cosmic continuity of a discourse that is both purely factual (scientific even) and purely subjective (and memorialist). Where the ontology of thought was once questioned, now is the issue of writing history (and stories) that she examines. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Every night in Shenzhen, China, a group of copyist painters starts working. Paul Heintz’s third participation in the festival (Non-contractuel, 2016 e Foyers, 2019) will register their daily lives, between art and blue-collar work.
—
Frame by frame, we unlock the mystery of Shānzhài Screens. By following the artistic and technological acts of a group of copyists, Paul Heintz reflects about the moment we’re in historically, in terms of art and painting, where the idea of copying a painting seems to transform into copying a screen. (Duarte Coimbra)
)
Much of what we know about the musical mythology and counterculture of the 60’s we owe to the images and the photographic talent of Jim Marshall. He captured many important photos of musicians like Bob Dylan or The Rolling Stones and historical moments like The Beatles last concert, Johnny Cash’s concerts at Folsom prison or Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar. This film chronicles the life of a singular artist, behind and outside his camera.
—
“I do see the music. This career has never been just a job, it’s been my life.”
Jim Marshall – rock n’roll photographer – is the author of emblematic images of the history of music. Jimmy Hendrix setting his guitar aflame at stage, Miles Davis sitting in a boxing ring, the boyish Bob Dylan following a stray tire down a New York street, Johnny Cash gesturing with his middle finger, Janin Joplin at home, or The Beatles in them last concert. There are countless moments captured by Marshall that became famous. A man of intense temperament, a life of excess and battling inner demons, who was loved or hated, there was no in-between. “If he loved you, he would lie down in front of a truck for you. If he hated you, he would happily drive the truck over you.”, says Amelia Davis, owner of Jim Marsall Photography LLC.
The portrait of the photographer who lived and died like an autentic rockstar that shows us his work and some of the most important moments in music. (Helena César)
The city of Hong Kong is waiting for a dangerous hazardous event, caused by exponential growth, that may never arrive. Liu’s tapestry of 16mm images reflects this dissonant urban symphony, alternating moments of alienations and natural elements.
—
Slices of city life, mechanical rhythms and flickering shadows make up the specular portraits of Simon Liu. Now, the plasticity of his 16mm camera (which sometimes blurs the images, sometimes reveals them in the porosity of analogue film, in a slow motion – creating poetic visual cadences), is accompanied by a sound composition that accentuates the human circulation in Hong Kong and the incommunicability in a metropolis. “Signal 8” discovers its political unrest in the picturesque dimension of a territory. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Diop’s first fiction is about another “journey”: the coming of age of a French teenager. Vanina is spending holidays in the French Alps and wishes to be with her best friend. But it’s with Simon and Mary Jane, her babysitters, that she seeks for a connection.
