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)
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)
In 2017, the director Louis Henderson and the producer Olivier Marboeuf went to Haiti to work with a group of artists on the translation to Haitian Creole and the rehearsing of a play. This was Édouard Glissant’s “Monsieur Toussaint”, about the last days of the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture. From this work, as well as improvisation moments, the film was born. A shared authorship work of resurrection and historical redemption.
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Toussaint Louverture was the great leader of the Haitian revolution. He was decisive for the independence of the country that took place already after his death, becoming the first black independent republic of the Americas. In the promise of that revolution what Haiti is there today? How do young people in the country feel the responsibility of the Haitian hero descendancy? In a collective, polyphonic film, inhabited by hallucination and promise of future, the theatre group The Living and the Dead Ensemble translates into Haitian Creole and stages Édouard Glissant’s play “Monsieur Toussaint”. This is about Louverture’s last days locked in his cell in the Jura Mountains, in the Alps, haunted by ghosts of the revolutionary past. But the most important Haitian literary and culture figure is the spiral. Therefore, the film writes itself and pours from every place. And the characters of Haitian historical pantheon come to haunt the actors who work and live the play in Port-au-Prince. (Carlos Natálio)
In a Philippine school young women learn how to do domestic chores and to babysit. Their goal is to be hired and work abroad in their bosses’ households. But they learn more. They have to know how to deal with sexual, verbal and physical abuse. And how to resist being far from their loved ones. This is a film that addresses female condition, as well as modern slavery in a globalised world.
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Overseas is an exceptional portrait of class, gender, human condition, in which we get to know the reality of some of the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW’s). Sung-A Yoon manages to translate everything that Filipino women are subjected to when they agree to work overseas, going to the homes of people who they’ve only met at phone or skype interviews. To achieve this goal, they face rigorous training to prepare for separation from their families and against any aggression – physical and verbal – such is the certainty that this is a likely scenario. They must withstand a period of at least two years without giving up. These women will join the 10 million Filipinos overseas: another film would not describe this tale of modern slavery any better. Sung-A Yoon keeps the stoicism of these women intact, in a humanistic and delicate film, an unmissable surprise. (Mafalda Melo)
Vernier is a great ironic observer. After a workshop with students at the Geneva University of Art and Design, the director went into the swiss night and filmed the conversations of a rich and extravagant youth, in a portrait of vanity and ostentation.
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Empty time, young time, champagne flows and the conversations come out as light lines of coke that disappear in the laughter of young friends who gather in Geneva. To boast is a natural figure that feeds the tone and ‘’to have” is just a consequence to enjoy. Chic and select, they swing in their golden cages surrendered to the fruition game. The night is theirs. (Carlota Gonçalves)
The city of Hong Kong is waiting for a dangerous hazardous event, caused by exponential growth, that may never arrive. Liu’s tapestry of 16mm images reflects this dissonant urban symphony, alternating moments of alienations and natural elements.
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Slices of city life, mechanical rhythms and flickering shadows make up the specular portraits of Simon Liu. Now, the plasticity of his 16mm camera (which sometimes blurs the images, sometimes reveals them in the porosity of analogue film, in a slow motion – creating poetic visual cadences), is accompanied by a sound composition that accentuates the human circulation in Hong Kong and the incommunicability in a metropolis. “Signal 8” discovers its political unrest in the picturesque dimension of a territory. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Diop’s first fiction is about another “journey”: the coming of age of a French teenager. Vanina is spending holidays in the French Alps and wishes to be with her best friend. But it’s with Simon and Mary Jane, her babysitters, that she seeks for a connection.
Inspired by the Greek and Latin poems that highlighted the arts of agriculture – like the Works and Days by Hesiod and Georgics by Virgil – this a film that accompanies the farm work of a Japanese family, in a little village next to Kyoto. Fourteen months of shooting translate into a eight-hour film that is a magnificent ode to working, to the land, to the soundscape and the passage of time and the seasons.
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Tayoko Shiojuri, a farmer, wife, and woman from a little village next to Kyoto, plays herself in the second feature by C.W. Winter & Anders Edström (The Anchorage) inspired by the Greek and Latin poems on the art of agriculture. Tayoko nurtures her family the same way she nurtures her land, and the Jeanne Dielmann-esque repetition of daily chores, portrayed with the peculiar sensibility of Edström’s camera and enriched with C.W. Winter’s sweeping soundscapes, make their way to one’s consciousness, as do the long hours of the film. The deep connection to Tayoko’s joys and sorrows and the haunting duration of her presence makes one feel with a heartbreaking force both loneliness and peace of living one’s fate, abiding the cycles of nature and the cycles of human life. (Anastasia Lukovnikova)
This is a film that accompanies the farm work of a Japanese family, in a little village next to Kyoto.
At the end of the nineties, Reinhart and Widrich invented the “tx-transform” process that inverts the cinematic axis of time and space. Now they filmed in a cinema in Berlin, with 135 actors, using a OmniCam-360. The result is something never seen before.
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Virgil Widrich’s films are conceptual epics (more difficult to explain than to watch). After “Copy Shop” converted each frame into photocopies, “Fast Film” applied the same technique to the history of cinema in origami and “Black Track” returned to that spatialization in a translucent 3D version, “TX-Reverse” resumes the technique of inversion of the space-time axes of “TX-Transform”, now with a 360º 10K camera, in a cinema room where the film itself is being projected. A succession of dancing deformations that, through the most advanced technology, reduce cinema to an art of shadows. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
Made in VHS and with YouTube images, this is a story of a sympathetic serial killer: a jaguar named Valerio. When he escaped the New Orleans zoo, he killed several animals. After being captured he decides to make a video diary for his significant other.
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Valerio is one of two jaguars in a zoo. One day he escapes and goes one a killing spree. He kills five alpacas, three foxes and one emu before being captured and sedated. In this sedated state Valerio makes a video diary to his significant other, the other jaguar named Lula. Valerio misses Lula and hopes to see her again. (Rui Mendes)
Awarded in 2018 at IndieLisboa, with Waste No.5 the Raft of the Medusa, the artist returns to the festival with his Waste series, a reflection on the human production of waste. This time with a particular look at digital technologies and its paradoxes.
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What if waste suddenly became huge? When we discover that underneath an orthodox church (in Helsinki) there is a world data server, which uses recycled water to cool itself, we confirm that nothing is what it seems. From here we start a trip around the world, passing through South Korea, Ghana and Turkey. The constant exclamation “How Great” becomes part of our lexicon, to amaze us, always. The world seen through the evocation of waste can only make the world alert. Come back Greta! (Miguel Valverde)
In 2014, IndieLisboa programmed the short film Quelqu’un d’extraordinaire, Monia Chokri’s debut work, an actress we know from Xavier Dolan’s films. Her first feature film, an intelligent and hilarious comedy, develops the same theme: the coming of age of a young woman. In this case it’s Sophia (the extraordinary Anne-Élisabeth Bossé), who recently got her PhD degree but doesn’t have bright professional options. She still lives with her older brother, her best friend.
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In 2014 IndieLisboa showed Quelqu’un d’extraordinaire, the directing debut of Monia Chokri, actress in some of Xavier Dolan’s films. Now, her first feature inscribes itself in the tradition of the familiar film from Québec, but also in the subtlety and cosmopolitanism of authors like Noah Baumbach or Greta Gerwig. This is a dramatic comedy about a young woman, not so young anymore, that just got her Ph.D. and finds emotional compensation in the relationship with her brother, due to lack of future perspectives. The constant irony is the weapon for mass good mood, but, by alternating comic and true pain – something that the actress Anne-Élisabeth Bossé dominates perfectly – characters get another kind of life and depth. We are being guided through the happiness clichés, but if La femme de mon frère could just be an intellectual version of Bridget Jones, it turns instead into a sensible film about growing and humility. (Carlos Natálio)
Winner of IndieLisboa in 2014, Mille Soleils is about the return of the director to Senegal to revisit two actors of the film Touki Bouki (1971), directed by her uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty. Real memories, fiction liberties and cinema as family.
Last year, IndieLisboa put up a program called Brazil Entranced with many important names of the emergent new and politically engaged Brazilian cinema, among them Your Bones and Your Eyes by Caetano Gotardo. In 2018 we saw Good Manners by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra. Now, Gotardo and Dutra together give us a story of two families and the hauntings of slavery and colonization, in a São Paulo city at the turn of the twentieth century.
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Maria, a nun, moves forward on dark stairs, a torch in her hand. She is scared, as if something is watching her, lurking in the dark. The scene looks like a pure archetype of horror but nothing, strictly nothing is going to be truly as expected in All the Dead Ones: neither the supernatural film that we imagine, nor the period film that seems so undoubtedly to take form. The feature takes place at a tipping point, in the twilight of the 19th century, during an era of societal change for Brazil. But again, change is not carried out so clearly, in the country as in the rich home of the Soares family. Slavery has been abolished in Brazil for ten years, but what remains of it in social structures, in class relations? For the Soares family, Europe is “the origin of everything”, Africa is a great indistinct magma, the tone is that kind of paternalism that the colonists imagine benevolent and magnanimous. All the Dead Ones observes whiteness and its hegemony in an unprecedented way in a world that seems to be moving forward … but is it really moving? For who? Released a few years ago, Caetano Gotardo’s first feature film was called O Que se Move, literally meaning what moves. This is a title that could have suited this too, in a film where we feel a world in turmoil, but where we also observe another which appears frozen. (Mickael Gaspar)
Workers of a building site in Senegal’s capital don’t get paid for months. Soulemain, one of them, decides to cross the ocean in search for a better life. 17-year-old Ana, despite being promised to another man, waits for the return of her love. Inspired by the figure of Penelope, but also Romeo and Juliet, Atlantique is a tale of spirits, trauma and growth. Cannes Grand Jury Prize of 2019.
Directed while still attending Le Fresnoy film school, this documentary was the inspiration for the director’s first feature film. A group of Senegalese friends that aspires to cross the ocean, in a journey that may also be between life and death.
Paulo cannot afford to pay alimony to his ex-wife. In order to be able to see his son again, he starts working at night as a taxi driver in Rio de Janeiro. Through the windows of the car, through the stories of his passengers, starts the journey and autopsy of a city. A city where the sun only arrives through a mirage. Nocturnal existences, tired shadows, solitude and silence that observe. Fabrício Boliveira won the acting prize at Rio Film Festival.
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Left to his own fate, Paulo, recently divorced, starts working as a taxi driver to survive in the big city and pay his 10-year-old son’s pension. While driving through the endless nights of Rio de Janeiro, we follow him in the interior of his taxi, where passengers who connect more intensely with Paulo’s history pass by. In this dark and throbbing chronicle, the unpredictability of the night occupies the forefront of the film, where oscillating and claustrophobic images work as a vehicle for anguish.
In this eighth feature film by Eryk Rocha, strolling between fiction and documentary, the director films the streets of Rio de Janeiro as a dark and decadent space, and where hope is only reborn inside the taxi, when new passengers help Paulo overtake loneliness and the urban chaos inherent to his night work. Only these characters can bring love and happiness back into Paulo’s life. (Inês Lima Torres)
In the period of Argentina dictatorship (1976 -1983) there were several civil accomplices that contributed to repression and were never taken to justice. In November 2015, the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights issued a report with 25 of those cases of proved corporate responsibility. That book was never printed. Perel tries here to render that book visible, in front of many of these companies’ headquarters.
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In this ‘sort of site-specific performance piece’, the Argentinean director Jonathan Perel (17 Monumentos, Toponymy) acts as a private detective, who sets out on a solitary road trip of 14,000 kilometres, to revisit the crime scenes of repressions of 1976-1983 dictatorship in his country. While he reads out loud the official reports on conspiracies, abductions and murders, we see the endless fences, framed by the windshield of the director’s car, shot undercover, at day-break. Those are not prisons that one sees behind the fences, but the fuming factory chimneys. The evidence that Perel collects, following the recently published report by the Argentine State, is deemed to hold corporations accountable for the crimes of the past, but the lack of transparency, evident in his exhaustive catalogue of images, forces one to also ask inconvenient questions about the present. (Anastasia Lukovnikova)
