For 7 years, Stefan Djordjevic saw his father only once before he passed away. Based on his memories of him, he gives us a tender goodbye story about a terminally ill father that looks for a new home for his son.
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Stripped of any objects other than a mobile phone that crashes in a race to try to catch a bus, a single father and his young son are forced to hitchhike to reach Belgrade. Resilience persists, Dusan and Laza are in this for the long run. Whatever shape that long run might take. How does one prepare the recipient of all our love for our perpetual absence? A sober but affective film about absence and saying goodbye. (Ana David)
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1992 was an important year for Spain: Barcelona’s Olympic Games and the Universal Exposition of Seville. But the narrative of a prosperous and modern country had his reverse. Like in a great illuminist encyclopaedia, the director will listen to the conversations in a typical bar in Cartagena, giving voice to people – workers, unemployed, demonstrators – that lived the arrival of the economic crisis, the close of factories and several incendiary revolts.
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Through a meticulous selection of testimonies, El Año del Descobrimento focuses on 1992, when the Seville Expo and the Barcelona Olympic Games took place as well as the working class revolt that burned the Parliament of Murcia. In Luis López Carrasco’s second feature film, the director works again on a documentary discourse, this time through the historical and social revival of a forgotten theme in a bar in Cartagena, Spain. The film is composed by the contribution of 45 citizens from peripheral neighborhoods of Cartagena and La Unión, and their memories from that period. An almost forgotten historical moment, it brings to light the importance of dialogue on class consciousness, the economic crisis and the role of unions. Above all, El Año del Descubrimiento sheds light on the importance of rescuing memory from oblivion covered by the past and the consequent vital power of cinema in its recovery. (Inês Lima Torres)
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Every year Nollywood, the Nigerian Hollywood, produces around a thousand films. Most of these don’t travel outside Africa. The first feature film by the twin brothers Esiri, based on two “twin” stories that precisely depict the desire to go to Europe, is a different case. Mofe, a middle-aged repairman in a factory, and Rosa, a young hairdresser and bartender, both look a way out of the colourful and imprisoning capital Lagos.
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The desire driving these two separate stories intersects in the common hope of their characters to migrate to another country. Spain and Italy are the two parts of the film, two cities casting a shadow (or a light) that never materializes in the film, the characters never walking its streets. They can’t get out of a vibrant and unequal Lagos: Mofe and Rosa’s journey is the center of action – from the desperate financial and bureaucratic impediments to the personal tragedies that, skillfully, the Esiri brothers never throw into excessive drama, in this strong first feature. Mofe and Rosa want a better future for their core family, but what the film questions is whether this Europe/future is nothing more than an illusion and if Lagos is not equally disappointing. We are searching for Mofe and Rosa’s desire and the territory to which it belongs. (Mafalda Melo)
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Father wolf lost his job, but since he is a hot male he secretly starts working as a gigolo in order to support his family. Mother wolf also has her secrets, involving female empowerment seminars.
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Toomas is a wolf engineer in a well paid job; he is also very attractive. After being fired he sees himself without income to support his family that includes his pregnant wife. Toomas is cornered, and accepts a job as a gigolo. Viivi enrolls in a female empowerment conference. The situations and adventures escalate and the sexual journeys that both Toomas and Viivi take culminate in a bizarre climax. (Rui Mendes)
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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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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 film that won Locarno’s FIPRESCI award in 2019 is a drama about the pressures of a modern and urban lifestyle. The first fiction film of the Brazilian director Maya Da-Rin focuses on the life of Justino (Regis Myrupu), a middle-aged native widower, that works in the port of Manaus. When his daughter tells him that she wants to go and study nursing in the city of Brasilia he starts having strange fevers…
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Justino is a 45-year-old Desana indigenous man who works as a watchman in the cargo port of Manaus, an industrial city surrounded by the Amazon rainforest. Since the death of his wife, his daughter has been his main companion. However, Vanessa, who works as a nurse, is accepted to study medicine in Brasília, and has to leave Justino. Faced with this information and feeling oppressed by the industrial city, Justino enters a languid and feverish state and begins to suspect that a mysterious creature is following him around. The enigmatic origin of its condition and the mysterious presence of the forest, creates a dreamlike atmosphere that infects the viewer with the same feverish sensation. Justino tells the story of a man whose deep connection with the natural world makes him suspicious of the predatory instincts of humans. In this sense, A Febre is inscribed as a fantasy, or a ghostly story. This is felt mainly due to the hybrid work of fiction crossed with non-actor characters, which challenges the viewer’s perception of the film’s magical realism. (Inês Lima Torres)
After the première of Onde o Verão Vai: episódios da juventude (Berlin Film Festival, 2018) David Pinheiro Vicente continues with his sensorial cinema, of touch and gaze. Produced by Gabriel Abrantes, this is the Easter of growing up, desire and the flesh.
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Diogo lives among angelic children and failed gown ups. Desire makes him grow up, despite all the childhood delights that still sing him lullabies. David (Pinheiro Vicente) also films between delicacy and dirt, i.e., between haunting sensations and the smell of blood. Then, everything gets stirred, elliptically and metaphorically, in a web tangled with fragments of what may be dreams, memories or visions (like the web of sexual innuendos connecting all the adult characters). At the center of the film a tension between death and guilt (which end up complementing each other in ritualistic sacrifice). (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
In almost every summer terrace one can find, stacked up or around a table, those very light white plastic chairs. This is a film essay, directed by a collective of Mexican architects, around this famous monobloc chair.
We are in 2050. The world is hours away from its ending, coming in the form of a cotton candy pink cloud. The order for everyone is: love yourselves. Because those who got lucky got lucky, and in heaven there is no more fooling around.
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A pink cloud is approaching and it will be the end of the world! After all, it looks like the virus was released ahead of time. This futuristic queer fable, lived in two narrative times with little defined contours, allows us to discover a beautiful love story, which could have been lived by Thelma and Louise. The pink aesthetic is reflected in the scenarios, in the costume design and in the flamboyant filters, and alludes to many references of 80’s video clips and games. Discovered in the last Tiradentes Festival, Arruda’s epic adventure, which is a good virus, risks contaminating many people. (Miguel Valverde)
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.
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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 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.
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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)
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.
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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)
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Another hot day in Casablanca’s beach in Marroco. Through El-Faris’s delicate and funny style we witness the emergence of desire in adolescence, the playfulness and curiosity of children and adults trying to be adults in vain.
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Kids and grown-ups on a beach day in Casablanca, Morocco. Nobody is alone, the interactions are multiple, desire and curiosity are out in broad daylight. Playfulness is mandatory and tenderness is unstoppable. At the end of the day, all the irreverence was worth it. As it always is. A film as deeply freewheeling and sweet as the story it narrates, Sukar is a lesson in editing and storytelling, deeply aware of the capacities of cinema as a universal language. (Ana David)
A mosquito escapes by the skin of his teeth. A tiger tattoo. Collecting evidence of infidelity. Betrayal voyeurism. Adultery and the hunt. Rethinking relationships and sexuality. Adult animation. The smile and the lonely orgasm.
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A woman on the prowl. A constant restlessness. The act of dealing with an infidelity is like looking into a mirror and wondering who will be the most beautiful. But things don’t last forever and small objects make all the difference. And after the doubt comes a curiosity and an inner knowledge and a new life. I am the most beautiful.
Summer is hot. By the lake Mia, 11-years-old, asks Hugo, a veteran 15-year-old boy, about his love story with Chaïnes. The language of childhood and its memories around questions of love, touch, torment, kisses…
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The universe of children and adolescents has been a recurring theme in Isabel Pagliai’s cinema. But unlike the traditional way of dealing with the theme, Pagliai subverts it and makes teenagers say what they think, in a very realistic way. In this world of which not much is known, behaviors become adult and it is suggested that perhaps it is in the middle, between naivete and perversity, that most adolescents find themselves. Medium length film, this documentary-fiction carries the time like a burden and densifies it. (Miguel Valverde)
