From 1922 to 1924, the German art historian Aby Warburg was committed to a psychiatric asylum in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Using his writings and clinic reports from that period, this is a journey through his mind, between madness and genius.
—Small film for the giant Aby Warbourg, a compelling author of the Mnemosyne museum. The persistent memory visits tragic elements of the life of the art historian, in the first person. Journals and clinical data complete the biography of an iconic designer. A huge exhibition wall grows and recedes in a progressive immersive distance; figuration of the movement of time, image, sound. Evocative and testimonial moment of Warbourg’s madness, which makes us complicit in the face of this insatiable creator. (Carlota Gonçalves)
Combining several animation techniques like digital 2D characters, 3D graphic elements, pastel drawing on live-action print-outs or silkscreen printing, this is an oneiric journey around symbols of death, bright colours and problems with no answer.
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“One day I dreamed that I couldn’t wake up from layers and layers of dreams.” In this animation, dreams explore the contradictions of the self, using different techniques to create a surreal and psychedelic universe where bright colors and a sparkling trumpet disguise the darker side of emotions. (Margarida Moz)
Images of crowd simulation are confronted with testimonies from Liverpool Football Club’s supporters who recall Hillsborough’s stadium disaster, in 1989, where 96 people died. Stadiums are reflected as places for both release and control.
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Nicolas Gourault applies the techniques he has used for Forensic Architecture to his film studies at Le Fresnoy. He uses the possibilities of 3D modeling and crowd simulation software, crossed with the collection of testimonies and archival materials (maps, photographs, television reports) to embody an event from the past that has crumbled in memories, but which redefined the football industry. “This Means More” is an emotionally powerful political essay on the community nature of a sport that is now for the elites. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
In the Mojave Desert lies the unfinished city of California, planned in the sixties to receive thousands of inhabitants, like Los Angeles or San Diego. Today, in the middle of empty streets, the city has a few more than 10000 thousand people. The trio of Belgian directors follows these new pioneers, that look for new beginnings, telling about their experiences, giving names to streets or making long walking journeys of exploration of the space.
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At a certain point in Victoria, its protagonist Lashay T. Warren films himself in front of a busted pipe in the street, gushing water. In the image he captures, at a certain point, he is able to find a rainbow and tells us: “look at a bad thing you can still get a rainbow”. This could well be the motto of this chronicler of desolation, a new pioneer, who in 2016 went to live with his family to Cal City. Today it is an unfinished city in the middle of the desert, because the plan made in the sixties to transform that place in a residence for thousands of people was abandoned. Warren and his work colleagues use their phones as compasses to identify the streets and keep the tracks clean. Visits to L.A. are now only made through Google Maps. The directors Benoot, De Ceulaer and Tollenaere aim to reflect on the subtle processes of racial and spatial segregation, but also on the creative potential of a space of which we are discoverers. (Carlos Natálio)
What’s the gap between pleasure and pain? What are the body’s limits in terms of sensitivity? Inspired by the violent, erotic and seductive images of the Chilean painter Carmen Silva, aunt of the director, this is a story of a wound that produces pleasure.
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A young man has an accident. His friend helps. His friend’s mother welcomes him. The wound that is born is hot and a perfect attraction to the abyss. It is in this context that the Chilean Woodroffe (whose English name contrasts with his origins), takes advantage of a situation that is never common. The family atmosphere has something “off-place”, and the house, apparently tidy, is about to explode in contained energy. Woodroffe risks being the next Chilean “case” after Dominga Sotomayor. (Miguel Valverde)
If you don’t fall asleep the bogey man will come for you! In the Slavic mythology it’s Babai who kidnaps the children. Aisagaliev’s film contains this oneiric fear of growing up, but is above all a vertiginous and sensorial voyage through the first visual and sonorous impressions of childhood. Two brothers and a rather severe father. The world tears apart before the eyes, they are blurry memories, pieces of happiness and humiliation.
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A Russian-born and US-based director Artem Aisagaliev comes back to his grandparents’ house in the Russian Far East to make a deep dive into his childhood memories, casting almost exclusively his own family members in his first feature Babai. Through the eyes of the two little brothers, the director wanders about the foggy border between the kid’s world and that of the adults, a border that you cannot cross unscarred. The camera sticks to claustrophobic close-ups of the faces, hands, and backs of the two boys, who move freely in a very limited space, the space that shrinks before one’s eyes giving way to an army-style discipline. Boys don’t cry in this world devoid of female presence, and if they do, Babai, a mythic folklore creature, will take them away. Babai is also the name of the boys’ grandfather, and this is a line easy to read: the boys will be kidnapped, eventually, from their world of surprise and wonder, to serve their duty as men. (Anastasia Lukovnikova)
According to the Islamic faith, barzack designates a state of limbo, between hell and paradise, after earthly life. In the Spanish city of Melilha, situated in the North of Africa, several young people are in this limbo, yearning for a passage to Europe. They live waiting, inhabiting the caves and crevices in the mountains next to the harbour. In this timeless, ancestral space, they light fires, sing and search in the darkness for the light of another life.
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The constellations of the lights on the distant shore of Spain are as unreachable as their look-alikes on the sky above for the group of boys stuck on the North coast of Africa in Alejandro Salgado’s first feature. Barzakh in Islamic culture is a state between life and death, and for the boys who try to make their crossing to Europe, it finds its earthly incarnation in the endless waiting on the cliffs, in-between the countries, the continents, the bare force of nature and the so-called ‘civilised world’, boyhood and adulthood. The boys are mere silhouettes against the scarce lights of the endless night, their shadows glide on the ancient walls of the caves, they have no names and no faces but they have voices to sign the songs about the land they have left behind and their dreams of the life that is yet to begin. (Mafalda Melo)
A single cinema shot can contain the turbulent destinies of a democracy. In the street, two filmmakers interview the journalist Marília Melhado. With the elections, the political atmosphere is tense and a group of Bolsonaro’s supporters attack the freedom of opinion.
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Journalist Marilia Melhado agrees to give an interview, at the Brazilian polls, on the election day that marks the decision between Jair Bolsonaro and Fernando Haddad. This simple description doesn’t convey the tangible impotence of the film, especially palpable in a moment of political polarization, virtually globally, in which public discussion becomes untenable. And if we must endeavor to listen to each other, let us start by listening to Marilia. (Ana Cabral Martins)
After being in the festival with Antão, o invisível (2017), the Portuguese-Swiss directors make their return with this, half “zoological documentary”, half fictional portrait, that takes place in a Geneve’s bird sanctuary. The rectangular framing, the young Antonin’s voice over hovering above that “sacred place”, but also a ecological argument and a detailed sense of observation, all is part of this magical island that captivates our gaze.
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The young and intriguing duo of directors formed by Maya Kosa and Sergio Da Costa delivers with L’Île aux oiseaux a second feature film of an almost unreal poetry although intimately linked to reality, back and forth between fiction and reality where one springs from the other as if by magic – which has always been at the heart of the work of the Swiss duo (of Polish and Portuguese origin respectively). Like the injured birds of prey, Paul, Antonin and the other employees of the Genthod center must relearn how to hunt in order to survive in a society which “allows no mistake”. “What is that smell?” Asks the young man, a newcomer to the center and a hero of the film, when he first enters where the little cages are with mice; “It’s shit, you’re going to get used to it,” replied Paul, who works there for a long time. A raw and simple opening sentence that sums up the film fairly well: grand in its terrible and contradictory simplicity. The scarcity of dialogues renders its content even more powerful. The words are carefully chosen, between wonder and precision, in a way that recalls Rohmer’s dialogues but with the simplicity and offbeat comic tone found on a Kaurismäki film. Like as if the many sequence shots which punctuate the film speak with images when the words are silent. (Mickael Gaspar)
How to go through a complicated year? Maybe film it. Mario Valero directs a travel journal, between cities and faces, a life condensed in Mini VD, a diary of the seasons, a detour.
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A travel, journal-like film, where Mario Valero sees friendship and nature as equal forces; a gesture of re-learning how to shoot and edit. The world is presented to us as a place where all ideas and connections are possible and work as a tool to simultaneously remind and forget the days, the faces, and the seasons, that metamorphose and get blurry and confusing. (Duarte Coimbra)
What does it mean to (still) believe in the revolutionary power of cinema? Four friends get together in a countryside estate to recreate parts of political iconic works like Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) or Faroccki’s Nicht löschbares Feuer (1969). After Leones (Indielisboa 2013), her first feature, Jazmín López elliptic style is back. We never know where the sound comes from or where the camera will go. Rui Poças is the director of photography.
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Considered one of the most promising voices in Argentina, Jazmín López (director of the incredible Leones shown in competition at IndieLisboa 2013) returns with this film in which four friends gather in a country house to reenact three iconic revolutionary works from the end of the 60’s: Godard’s La chinoise, Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire and the performance that resulted in a series of photographs, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) by Ana Mendieta. What could be a rational work here is an inventive and full of life film (conversations run over and let themselves slide between interpretation and reinterpretation), invoking the inspiring power of music that underlines what cannot be forgotten, calling for long travellings through the rooms of the house and its exterior, will a brilliant cinematography signed by Rui Poças) giving it monumentality. (Miguel Valverde)
Science and the occult, UFOs and green lacewings. Life plays tricks on us and not even a brilliant scientist is safe, on that fatidic evening of a picnic by the lake.
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A melancholic and amusing animation about a scientist and his faith. His indecisions become a way to ponder about some of the most urgent issues in our society, from climate change to gender identity. The proposal seems to get even more interesting when most of the film’s questions stay open for the audience to weigh. (Duarte Coimbra)
Mamadou Dia’s first feature film comes to us doubly prized at Locarno Film Festival (Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present competition and First Feature). Shot in his hometown, Matal in Senegal, this is the story of two brothers, Tierno and Ousmane, that clash because of the wedding of their two children. The first wants his boy to marry his brother’s daughter, the beautiful Nafi. What is also at stake is the spreading of fundamentalism in a small village.
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Baamum Nafi is a family tale centered on Tierno, the imam of a Senegalese village, and his daughter Nafi. Neither of them is interested in blindly following the wishes of Tierno’s brother, an Islamic leader who forces his authority on the village, nor of succumbing to religious extremism. Pursuing a marriage-contract between the children of the two brothers and embracing a shift towards hyper-conservative leadership would be a tragedy for all inhabitants. A pulsating first work through the interpretations of Alassane Sy and Aïcha Talla, Baamum Nafi is a cinema lesson and we can only look forward to the next film by Mamadou Dia. Although the works of Dia and Ousmane Sembène (whose work we show this year in the retrospective section) are separated for decades, what moves them, in the heart of Senegal, is still there: a cinema of Good and Evil, of great beauty. (Mafalda Melo)
When children play, adults play as well: some are DJing with microwaves, the others turn themselves to bacon snacks. This is the Nordic humour of two directors whose work we previously met in 2016, with the short Small Talk.
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It’s Saturday afternoon in a Norwegian play-land. Children play uninhibited while an adult couple watches and eavesdrops on a conversation between three women about the existence of bacon on chips. That same couple decides to meddle in the conversation where they are not wanted instead of resolving their own issues. In great Noewegian humor awkwardness ensues while we sink lower in our chairs until it’s over. (Rui Mendes)
In the city, chaos devours and transforms everything with its unrest. One night, Reine, a young loner, becomes attracted by something mythical, a sort of a guide, a supposed oneness.
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In classical Roman religion, a genius loci was the protective spirit of a place. Reine is the main character of the film who can be said to live a spiritual experience of the city for one night. Reine looks for something, but doesn’t quite know what she is searching for. A night adrift, with heightened senses. A tremendously delicate animation, with different techniques and textures and with the recognizable visual universe of illustrator Brecht Evens (Marona’s Fantastic Tale). Adrien Merigeau moves, with this animation, to another level. (Carlos Ramos)
The cinema of Bas Devos is particularly attentive to imperceptible movements and overshadowed identities. Ghost Tropic, shot in just 15 days, follows the night journey of Khadija, a 58-year-old woman that realises she lost her last subway and has to walk home. This is a minimalist portrait and a humane adventure that looks at the night of the homeless, the securities, the night as a space for discovery, vulnerability and bonds between people
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An evening light floods a room in an old house. Twilight is an indicator of change, of something that may not be right. And it is in this unstable atmosphere that the Belgian Bas Devos presents his character. An Arab woman who is unable to return home at the end of a working day. Our senses are immediately alert because something is going to go wrong. These thoughts that assault us that are part of the narrative but are not written or filmed. Together with the film, they allow the establishment of new codes and this is where originality takes over the film. The attentive and active spectator is in the film, by its main character, with her pains and illnesses, in short, with her life. That is why it is so beautiful to go back to that first room and feel an emerging light, so clear that almost blinds us. It is our heart beating. Devos (from whom IndieLisboa had already shown the short film We Know) is clearly a filmmaker to follow. (Miguel Valverde)
People living in big cities will relate to this drama. A young woman has a Sisyphean task ahead: to carry a mattress up the stairs to her apartment. Almost without words and filmed in 16mm, this physical comedy is also an homage to the city of New York.
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There are a handful of films whose representation of a truly New York experience includes an example of public urination: Kids, Frances Ha and also Moving. But the quintessence that this film captures is broader and an illustration of how any change – material or emotional – is the most difficult when done in solitude. Even if it’s as simple as pulling a mattress up a flight of stairs, if “you can make it there, you can make it anywhere”. (Ana Cabral Martins)
Holem Wood is a housing estate in the north of England, built in the 50’s in order to supply homes for the working-class people. With the years it became an isolated place. There lives Tyler, a 16-year-old boy who has never attended school.
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In a low-cost housing complex in the north of England, children spend most of their time on the street, growing up together and learning to face the adversities of a life of exclusion. In this portrait of childhood there are no adults and the rules are defined by other hierarchies. There is no restraint in joy or revolt. A childhood on the edge that does not anticipate a better future. (Margarida Moz)
