Elba has been through a lot. Her daily routine is made of house chores and field work, taking care of the animals, writing “letters in the air” to eternity. The collective of directors Los Segundos filmed a letter of reply, inspired by Elba’s resistance and strength.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
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In the work of Alice dos Reis, an artist working and living between Amsterdam and Lisbon, the sea world has been the subject of reflection. Here, krill swarms carry nano-cameras. Are they conscious of the images they produce as seen by a human gaze?
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Névine is a secondary school monitor that likes her thankless job. She has to deal with teachers, administration and students. Logan, a pupil she is fond of, wants to get a cap back from lost and found. This will bring unexpected consequences.
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The organized chaos of a school shapes the professional daily life of Névine, a young monitor whose priority is to help the students, not control them. When Logan, one of the most restless teenagers, finds himself involved in a disagreement, both will realize how unfit the school system is to meet the individualities of its students. Tuesday From 8 to 6 is a film of infinite sweetness, endearing humor, and a meticulous understanding of the school ecosystem, able to throw us all back into the chairs of the classroom. (Ana David)
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The starting point of Uppercase Print is the true story of some graffities that appeared in 1981, in the wall of the Communist Party headquarters, in the city of Botoșani. There was a subsequent investigation to find the author of these subversive messages towards the regime of Ceaușescu. Based on a play by Gianina Cărbunariu about this case, but also archive videos, Jude questions the moulding of individuals in dictatorship times.
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In a large number of films that followed one another, but are not alike, Radu Jude builds one of the most harrowing and exciting oeuvres in contemporary Romanian cinema. However, what does the picaresque farce Aferim! has in common with the literary surrealism of Scarred Hearts and the historical staging in the game of mirrors I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians? Undoubtedly, more than it seems: first, a discreet but sharp irony and, above all, an uncompromising look at the tacit history of his country – no matter the period and genre of this cinema. There are two types of images in Uppercase Print. First, black and white archival images from the 1980s under Ceausescu. Exciting and frightening images of smiling propaganda, where robotic voices echo dictatorship slogans with fanfare. Other images date from today, in a studio with bright neon lights in vivid colors. Facing the camera, actors recite (more than repeat) the reports written by the communist militias. Disproportionately numerous and detailed descriptions, all related to the same incident: a simple revolutionary slogan written in capital letters (hence the title) by a Romanian high school student in the 1980s. The news is simple, the graffiti author was quickly identified, but the fascist administrative machine’s approach is terrifying because it is relentless by the force of repetition. The investigation is endless, like a gigantic monster that cannot be killed. Uppercase Print alternates between these two families of images, between these two nervous tales with cold monotone voices that give us the shivers: the anecdotal and the national, the hidden history and the propaganda, the superficial smile and the madness behind the scenes of yesterday and today. (Mickael Gaspar)
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Makavejev’s masterpiece was banned in Yugoslavian for 16 years. In part because it explores the connection between sexual repression/liberation and the political social systems. The film depicts the affair between a Jugoslav Marxist woman and a soviet skater, while paying tribute to the work of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian-American famous psychoanalyst. The film’s frenetic montage and its different elements compose a kind of cinematic orgasm in itself.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
In March 1953, the news about the death of Joseph Stalin shocked the URSS. Using archive footage, mostly unseen, Loznitza shows us all the steps from the announcement and the preparations to the funeral ceremonies. Alternating black and white with colour (especially red, the colour of the regime), but also the sad faces, the tears, the mourners, everything renders clear the personality cult around the soviet leader.
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Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (The Event, The Trial) invites one to live through the four days of the farewell with ‘the beloved leader of the Soviet people’ Joseph Stalin in March, 1953, ‘not as an observer of a historical event or an admirer of rare archival footage – but as a participant and a witness of a grandiose, terrifying and grotesque spectacle’, in his own words. The oppressive nature of the Soviet regime is revealed through the ritual: the never-ending procession of mourners lining up in front of the coffin in Moscow, the speeches prophesying the leader’s immortality reaching out to the farthest corners of the Soviet land in the elliptical montage of State Funeral. Loznitsa seamlessly pieces together blood-coloured banners and crowded streets in monochrome, plastic flowers and genuine tears, breeding a vertiginous nightmare of the film, that awakens one in cold sweat. (Anastasia Lukovnikova)
Since his parents died, Colin has been living with his grandfather, Karl. When Karl leaves to hunt a narwhal, Colin becomes a clandestine passenger in his grandfather’s house-sled. He must overcome his fears and learn the secrets of the Great North.
A shy girl visits the park with her protective father. But when she meets another girl full of energy they play nonstop. At the end of that magical day, nothing will be like before.
The director and actor from Mauritania, Med Hondo, surprised the world of cinema with his first film (Golden Leopard at Locarno), shot over four years and with a low budget. It is the struggle of a Mauritian emigrant in Paris, facing precarious work conditions, discriminatory paying, humiliation and indifference. An original manifesto, echoing cinema verité, eisensteinian montage, satire and the absurd.
It is still raining and Noah’s Ark must soon leave. But the kiwi bird and the chameleon aren’t on the passenger list. The two friends decide to travel as stowaways. What happens when they are discovered?
Sometimes neighbors play tricks and surprise us. Cesina Bermudes, a reformed obstetrics doctor, once knocked at Mire’s door offering help. The director thanked and, with her memory and creativity, returned the gentile gesture.
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In an act of honest generosity, a 80 year old woman offers furniture to a younger neighbor that lived on Santos Dumont Avenue. In one morning, possibly spring, reading a newspaper clipping about a woman doctor that lived in the same avenue, that generous woman finally got a name: Cesina Bermudes. Doctor, obstetrician, researcher and feminist, “Painless Labor” is a portrait of someone that briefly passed through our lives but left a legacy that we try to unwrap. (Rui Mendes)
In 2013, Soares won a prize at Indielisboa in the section Brand New with the short animation film Outro Homem Qualquer. Now he returns to give image and sound to a precise moment of suspension: a sad man in his room facing a moment of indecision.
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Still and alone, one man, another man, in a bed, at the window, let themselves be trapped in the air of things and in the body. Flies and flowers, keys, an atmosphere in motion in a space that breathes, quiet and broken, and sees the size of the gesture. The suspension is in line… Outside, the city repeats gestures, speeds up the mechanics; fall, leave, get up… isolate things, open your eyes, calibrate time. A film that knows how to wait. (Carlota Gonçalves)
In 2014, IndieLisboa exhibited the documentary Costa da Morte taken place in that Galician region, where Patiño is from. Its landscapes and stories possess a strong oneiric and fantastic dimension. These are explored in this supernatural fiction about the search for Rubio, a diver that rescued several shipwrecked bodies. Images are paralysed here with its inhabitants. Words float as apparitions, between ghost, witches and monsters.
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Alongside Eloy Enciso or Oliver Laxe, Lois Patiño belongs to a new interesting generation of the Galician cinema. In 2014, IndieLisboa showed his first feature Costa da Morte, a documentary on that Galician region from where the filmmaker is born. Now he returns to the same place exploring the mythical and supernatural imaginary of that coastal village that was once called the “end of the world”, due to its high number of shipwrecks. Their inhabitants stand still like paintings, everything happens today as it was a thousand years ago. What happened to Rubio, the diver that once fetched the bodies of the people that drowned? One thinks that maybe it was the monster that takes away those who live, but doesn’t give back their bodies. In Red Moon Tide’s universe – resembling Tarkovsky’s cinema but also H. P. Lovecraft’s literature – there are ghosts, witches, mirrors, the sea and the moon. The whispering, the walking, the waiting, the planning is made outside the images and within the sound. (Carlos Natálio)
The work of De Bernardi (Elettra, IndieLisboa 2018) gets his influence from literature, music and experimental American cinema from the 70’s. In his new film, time passes since September 2012 in Naples to 2019. A group of actors read, over the years, the chapters of the last of Tolstoy’s novels Resurrection. It’s not only the spaces of Turin, Milan, Berlin that changed, but also cinema’s power to “resurrect” some of the artists that died in the meantime.
Camila lives surrounded by gadgets, cables and the brightness of screens. Her work is fixing broken machines. Her loneliness is momentarily broken by online presences, the sharing of dreams and lynchian voyages.
Grandma is not like any other. Her Édouard is already gone, but she doesn’t give herself to loneliness. She dresses with strong colours, sends emails to her friends, and dominates the internet. She’s a queen between her gadgets and her memorabilia. This is her portrait.
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Suzanne is a 21st century grandmother. Emails, several per day. Tablets, at your fingertips. Bitcoins, monthly investment. The internet occupies her day, but it does not erase the loss of her husband Édouard. She continues to talk to him and analog photographs continue to flood the house. Suzanne lives between two worlds, a space that belongs to ghosts. A film that is constantly challenging and provoking us, but never for free. (Carlos Ramos)
Adapting a novel by the Portuguese writer Mário de Carvalho, Júlio Alves (Sacavém, IndieLisboa 2019) gives a bittersweet comedy about conjugal relationships, separations and communication. Arnaldo (Miguel Nunes) and Bárbara (Ana Moreira) want to end their relationship. We don’t know the reason, but we know they share the “paternity” of a turtle. Who will stay with the turtle? Where would it want to go? In this push-play game, the animal goes its way.
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On the verge of rupture, doubt always arises. Júlio Alves’ first feature film is an adaptation of a work by Mário de Carvalho, an author that Alves has revisited in some of his short films. Now the universe is that of human relationships; – in this case, a couple is separating and goes through the always painful process of knowing who gets what, what belongs to who, who leaves and who stays, who is ready to compromise. Things are apparently not so bad, but who gets the turtle? The structure of the film is very well defined with an elegant composition of plans (Alves knows very well how to film closed spaces, specifically houses), the actors (the duo Ana Moreira / Pedro Lacerda) are very well directed always on the verge of suffering/apathy, and the montage has a correct rhythm that allows us to have the right information at every moment. And from there, just look in the mirror, because Júlio Alves hits us right in the eye. (Miguel Valverde)
In a laboratory, male mosquitoes are modified in order to transmit a lethal gene to the females. A man, a woman and a woman transgender live in a polyamorous relationship. Against the epidemic of the reactionary, the autonomy of intimacy and reproduction.
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In times of epidemics that spread through mosquitoes, laboratories are genetically modifying these insects to contain their spread. In the background there are reports of cities occupied by military personnel who, in a display of strength, declare war on the enemy. Meanwhile, love persists and reproduces itself in logics that seem to contradict the binary thinking applied to nature. In a scenario of quasi-science fiction, we cross an unreal universe where music works together with the characters in the construction of the drama. (Margarida Moz)
