Time has not stood still in Mr. Acácio Pina Coelho’s strange workshop.
Secção: National Competition
Bobô is a film whose narrative comes from the meeting of two women, Sofia and Mariama. The engine of the film is the synergy created between them in the defense of a child. Sofia, the protagonist of the film, is a character who lives trapped in the shadows of her childhood, the weight of their “heritage”, from which it is urgent to break free. Mariama appears as someone also linked to this “inheritance.” She follows the rules demanded by her belonging, but at a certain moment she is forced to disobey to change the fate of little Bobô and prevent her from being subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Characters Sofia and Mariama were redesigned with actresses Paula Garcia and Aissatu Indjai (debuting in this film), who put a lot of their experiences, personality and beliefs in them. We did a lot of research and reading, field work with the immigrant Guinean community, did some testing. This preparation allowed us a safe shooting, with space for improvisation. I think Bobô is a film with an undoubtedly feminine internal optic and logic, but the feminine here is not, as is so often portrayed, in the field of what is earthy and tangible. It lies instead with issues that transcend us: the relationship with death, the rules of the World, things that we cannot name. (Inês Oliveira)
If the scorpion could see and the viper could hear, there would be no escape”. The viper is deaf and the scorpion can’t see, so it is and so shall be, the same way the countryside is peaceful and the city bustling and the human being impossible to satisfy. Lacrau demands the return “to the curve where man got lost” in a journey from the city towards nature. The escape from chaos and emotional void we call progress; matter without spirit, without will. The search for the most ancient sensations and relationships of mankind. The amazement, the fear of the unknown, the loss of basic comforts, loneliness, the meeting with the other, the other animal, the other vegetable. A dive looking for a connection with the world. Where beginning and end are the same, but I am not. (João Vladimiro)
Sometimes under the nose of a man there are things that only he fails to see. A tortoise that will not move from the same place reveals the stubbornness of a man who goes to the other side of the world to find it. An animation with color and different scales, based on a short story by Almada Negreiros. (Carlos Ramos)
“In far away Paraguay, there was a young man … who in his heart had an empty meadow.” This is the theme for a musical film in animation, where the director plays exemplary with screens, guns and money, between narrative and abstraction. Chagall, Picasso and Kandinsky hang around in a synthesis that seemed impossible, a film adapted from a book by P. Cachapa. (Miguel Valverde)
The tormented escape of a young African from his native land. The search for a better world, where war is not a part of everyday life. Even when the will of one man is unshakable, everything else around can play a prank on him. An animation that leaves us breathless as we accompany this bitter journey. (Carlos Ramos)
António, Zé Maria and João live in the House as they build it. For two years they restarted processes over and over according to their functions in the House. The transformations of the rooms forces constant changes in its organization. The rooms for eating, dressing or relaxing change. As do the inhabitants. Time passes. The inhabitants move into and out of shot. The camera doesn’t follow them. It stays there focusing on the particular. Natural light invades the geometric spaces, intensifying as the work advances. The sound environment also changes. The silences intensify. The contrasts are stronger and stronger. At the end we see the men who make the film for some, the work for others, or simply a house.
Jorge é um escritor solitário de ficção popular. À noite, ele olha através de janelas iluminadas para dentro das casas das pessoas e pensa, sim, eles são felizes. Um dia, o acaso – conclui – leva-o à casa onde Laura vive com o filho, André, e através das
My research started from a circumstance or curiosity. A process or a study to find the intangibility of an object that is always in motion, that never stops, in no life, at no time. We cannot talk about it, only about what it does. About its effects (…). (Leonor Noivo)
Haunted by their own directionless lives, two pre-adolescent girls reunite while visiting their ailing grandmother. In the midst of her fantasies of a medieval past ‚ one consumed by fear and desire – the two girls are transformed and confront a legacy of oppression. Love is finally, an entrancement of legs, a union of bellies, a brief tremor of arteries, a confusion of mouths, a battle of veins, a rolling of thighs, whoever says otherwise is a beast. Gregório de Mattos (séc. XVII) (Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt)
“Exotic” is the result of a three-week artistic residence in Maputo (Mozambique) in March 2008. Besides exploring the elements of local culture and its impact on the rhythm and daily routine of the city, it can also touch topics like the movement and the inscription of the body within urban spaces.
A young Corean man walks in the streets of Busan filled with rage and will to kill. His never-ending inner speech of hate seems directed to each and every person he crosses in the streets or the metro. However, as he is constantly facing his own reflection we come to doubt the limit between hating and self-hating, between reality and phobic distortion of one’s personality. (Karim Shimsal)
Amadeo was not only a great painter but also a total artist. Trapped by the country where he was born, by the time of destruction in which he lived and by himself, he had a short life and the international recognition that few Portuguese artists could have had was not assented to him.
Paula lives between the education of her daughter Beatriz, who gives her a vital strength to face the days, and the undesired heritage of looking after her own mother Carminda, a demented and unpredictable woman. It’s summertime and is sizzling. Paula, is no longer a daughter, but a full-time mother. She dresses, feeds, bathes, cleans and beautifies. However, one unforeseen morning, somewhere, and with no apparent reason besides exhaustion, the crack opens. Explodes. (Cláudia Varejão)
A heavy metal band plays in a stage half forgotten in the dark and the powerful sound of the guitar pierces a curtain of smoke. But the night has many stages and when the concert is over, one of the elements returns home alone, in silence. Waiting for him is an apartment almost empty and a grandmother needing some company. (Ágata Pinho)
As he learns his mother died, a man who had left for France to find a job and a living is now returning to Portugal. We follow his wanderings, the places he forgot. We feel the stranger he has become in the eyes of the other people. Gone long ago, he didn’t know then he would lose everything. He has now to grieve his own way. (Karim Shimsal)
A film of artistic quotes that corrupts the system by misbehaving. The director begins with a quote from Bresson saying that a film should be built on white and changes it to yellow. We witness the preparation of a film and all the stages of the process. With this film, Godinho asserts his name in the national panorama. (Miguel Valverde)
In a lake surrounded by buildings, a man builds a boat. The dream of an impossible journey, in freedom’s search of the memories from an eternal past. A reflection on the effect of time and space’s metamorphoses in a man’s life and in his happy death.