Graham Chapman wrote and gave voice to his own autobiography in film, through a text taken from a book with the same name which he recorded shortly before his death, making one last meeting of Monthy Python possible, only with the presence of Eric Idle missing. John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam recorded their voices in dialogue with the text read by Chapman and interpret themselves and other characters in a hilarious staging of the hectic life of the only "dead parrot" among the six. A mixture of real image and over a dozen different types of animation, the film tells with more or less truth (we will never know how much) the life and work of Chapman. A funeral eulogy, read by Cleese, is the moment that does more justice to his legacy. (M. M.)
A junkyard in a desolate landscape, an obese woman dressed as a mechanic roasting a pig, a dying man under a scorching sun collapses and becomes her prisoner. In a no man’s land, Patrick Mendes takes us once more to a macabre universe, where the main character, almost terrifying, manipulates her victims. (R. F.)
A tile film, made of maritime motifs and variations on the similarities and differences between two men and their desires. There is a law in economics that says that there may be many people wanting and many people offering what is desired, but for an exchange (or a date) to happen, there must be a double coincidence of wants. (João Vieira Torres)
A sensitive and fun film, where the most complicated issues are adressed with the mastery of simplicity. Rodrigo is deaf, but installs sound systems in cars. His t-shirt visually shows the variations of the frequencies of the sound waves. In an ambivalent duality between what goes and comes, Mascaro builds one of the most delicate narratives of this festival. (MV)
Usalullaby transports us to a dreamlike world where microscopic rabbits caress the body of a gigantic dolphin.
A gentle comedy and a melancholic love story of a film-within-a-film refracted through a dry, deadpan humour. A film crew are making a documentary on contemporary dance theatre in Argentina, with the sound recordist, Loro, caught in the midst of a messy break-up with his girlfriend, who has dumped him by letter. Loro begins to fall for one of the dancers in the film, only for her to disappear and leave him with a dilemma.
Without knowing it, we attach significance to phantom stories that circulate around us; Man kann nicht alles auf einmal tun, aber man kann alles auf einmal lassen, is one of those stories.
Kurdrjavka ‚ Pikku kippura is a piece compiled mainly of archive material, centring on the launch of Laika the dog into space in 1957.
Retrato is a film about the memory of a place, a home, a family, in a dialogue between portraits hanging on the walls who talk about their feelings, power games, thus creating an atmosphere of mystery and seduction.
Coisa de Alguém is documentary film which depicts the workaday life of a lost and found office in Lisbon, reflecting upon notions of property, loss and retrieval, and the dynamics of a modern complex society.
‘The German-born baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was a wandering troublemaker: feminist, Dadaist, lesbian, proto-punk and provocateur in 1910s and 1920s Berlin and New York. A scandalmonger and maximalist she realised the old ideal of dissolving the boundaries between art and life every single day. Elsa now returns in a cinematic phantom portrait made by over 50 young artists, who entirely in her spirit have contributed a fragment to the total picture along the lines of the surrealistic ‘exquisite corpse’ model. The Filmballad of Mamadada is something as rare as a work that renews the scandalous ideals of the avant-garde without the slightest trace of retro nostalgia.
The Missing Scarf is an animated film that explores in an unexpected way some of mankind’s most common fears: unknown, failure, rejection, and death.
This is the story of a man who created a jungle next to the highway, building with his bare hands beautiful and unbelievable works of engineering in the forest. He is known as Tarzan from Argelaguer because of the peculiar Tarzan remakes recorded with the collaboration of a 14-year-old boy. Sobre la Marxa puts together the pieces of an extraordinary life of numerous facets: the aged man who is still a child at heart, the modern savage, the visionary admired for those who go on a pilgrimage to his forest, the misunderstood to whom many labelled a lunatic.
15-year-old Chérif feels like a million bucks behind the wheel of a stolen car. Placed under the guardianship of his Aunt and Uncle, he has to return to his apprenticeship as a mason. It’s his last chance. But every night, graffiti artists descend upon the city’s walls. And with this, a whole new world opens up before him.
The natural pools of Varadouro on the island of Faial in the Azores suddenly gain a mythological dimension.
Zima travels through the glacial beauty of the Siberian Winter following the words of people who have to struggle with nature under one of the harshest climates on Earth.
Alles Was Irgendwie Nützt shows a multitude of animals brought together in a rhythmical sequence of photographs of years of studies and experiments on animals.
Angélique’s Day for Night tells in a shadow play style the importance of François Truffaut’s Day for Night in the life of Angélique.
