Tsai Ming-Liang’s beautiful, frail, contemplative cinema is back. Kang (his usual actor Kang-sheng Lee) is a man that lives alone in his house and starts to feel a mysterious pain. Non lives in Bangkok in a small apartment. When the two men meet, sharing their loneliness, the Taiwanese director’s art slowly explodes, in an almost endless number of meanings. Rizi was in competition in the last Berlin Film Festival.
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There are two things always present in Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinema. The first is the expression of friendship towards his actor Kang-sheng Lee. The second is the thorough capacity for observing and listening to reality, which makes each new film a refinement of the last one. The two elements are present in Rizi, a film that seems to have been made against solitude, of both the director’s and its characters. Kang is tormented by a back pain, something that Liang’s cinema has been documenting throughout several films. Anong Houngheuangsy is a masseur who lives in his Bangkok apartment where he prepares his own meals. Intentionally not subtitled by the director, this is a film of communion that is not achieved through words. Instead, by the encounter of bodies, a simple music box or by the inhabiting of the urban space in which intimacy is a nuance within a busy sonorous landscape. It’s in the duration of the shots that the decisive mutations of reality are played. (Carlos Natálio)
What will happen when we know we’re going to die? Will light change? Will birds sing more intensely? Death comes to inhabit the relationship of two women, together for a long time. One is terminally ill, the other will stay and should nurse. The days go by in an atmosphere of goodbye. In a small house in the woods the love of the couple remains, their talks, the touch of their bodies, memory. But, inexorably, despair is digging deep in close up faces.
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Two real women, two faces, a kiss, a hug. This demonstration of absolute love throws Torres Lleiva’s film into a torrent of emotions. We perceive a constant mal à l’aise that contaminates the relationship but we don’t know why. We are invited into the middle of a relationship as confidants. From this moment on, we realize that it was a disease that installed a “thing” that kills and will not disappear. And this is where everything adjusts, with advances and setbacks, as is typical of uncertainty. There are very few films that create knots that do not untie, but with tenderness allow any glimpse to be a lifeline. And that is why the film includes stories from other times that help us to understand its present. Lleiva’s is full of faces and exhausted bodies, showing that even in pain it is possible to show sensuality. Vendrá la muerte and tendrá tus ojos is one of those films where you feel like staying for all eternity. (Miguel Valverde)
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Fimed in 16mm, Camilo Restrepo’s first feature film (La impresión de una guerra, IndieLisboa 2016 e Cilaos, IndieLisboa 2017) is an escape, an hallucination and a fever. Pinky runs away from a sect and takes refuge in a factory of illegal t-shirts. There is a hypnotic journey to be made between corridors, paints, slogans and guns. The aim is liberation. A cinema that dreams of another Colombia: without oppression, corruption or religious instrumentalization.
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A survivor escapes from his religious sect and finds it hard to blend into the outside world, still imbued with the violence he witnessed and instigated. For his first feature film, Colombian director Camilo Restrepo is inspired by the true story of his friend Luis Felipe Lozano, “Pinky”, who plays his own role in Los conductos. It is a film inhabited by violence, a philosophical and supernatural tale taking us to the limits of the instrumentalization of religion and widespread violence in Colombia. It is a cathartic film that Restrepo offers to his friend, in a form of docu-fiction filmed in 16 mm, The film captures many symbols, as well as a certain theatricality to best represent Pinky’s internal emotions, in a fragmented montage. Between realistic passages and scary projections, Pinky’s journey is not an easy one. After the murder, supposed to free him from his indoctrination, his anger remains in a world which refuses to open its doors to him. Various historical or literary figures from Colombian culture visit him to confront him with the moral dilemmas he faces. Because if in our reality the murder never took place, in that of Los conductos, it questions fluid concepts like Good and Evil, which Pinky has trouble conceiving since for so many years he thought he was “Chosen”. (Mickael Gaspar)
Fifteen dancers tour the piece Crowd by the choreographer Gisèle Vienne. The stage is a dance floor, in homage to the 90’s raves. Erotic impulses, random encounters, love in super slow motion. The director documents their work, but suddenly dance falls into cinema’s creative pit. And the boundaries – between bodies, relationships, stage and reality – become more and more fluid, in this journey through love, dance and the night.
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If it Were Love is not just an exceptional opportunity, for those who missed it in Lisbon, to get to know the work of choreographer Gisèle Vienne in Crowd. Perhaps it is even more valuable as a thorough revisiting of its characters and movements, in a brilliant system built by Patric Chia, who directs the viewer’s gaze to a confusion between reality and fiction, when filming the dancers but also the backstage conversations. The film is responsible for the same trance in which the characters are on stage, to the sound of 90’s rave music, and nobody wishes to break free. Patric Chia continues to explore the world of the deepest human emotions, in its authentic and performative dimensions, with a clearly expressive and unique authorial language. (Mafalda Melo)
Joan D’Arc is a symbol of occidental spirituality and of a certain social French psyche. In 2017, Dumont directed Jeannette, l’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc, a musical based on a play by Charles Péguy. Jeanne is the sequel that recuperates from the first film the 10-year-old Lise Prudhomme for the role of Joan. We are not in historical realism here, but in the modernisation of a myth from an ever-renewing childhood, from a freed female condition.
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Bruno Dumont again adapts the texts by Charles Péguy devoted to the historical figure of Jeanne D’Arc. It is 1429, Jeanne is imprisoned and tried. After a dancing and carefree Jeannette, this second part seems more austere and more theatrical but it proves to be more sensitive and majestic. The expression of the body gives way to the expression of the verb. This film is no longer frankly a comedy, like the filmmakers’ works since the series Le P’tit Quinquin. The filmmaker seems to revive the sobriety of the past, and chooses to report on events (a war, a trial, a church) only using a voice, whether it is a comment (characters are like the radio hosts of the action), an interrogation, or a song. These oratorical jousts become fascinating and succeed in replacing the actionby force of evocation. Each word, interpreted with fragility by non-professional actors, has its singular tone and phrasing. Bringing a completely Brechtian distance, this vocal game does not preserve less the mystery of Jeanne and our fascination. The filmmaker then questions our relationship to spirituality. The profane and the sacred mix, in the image of the singer Christophe, an improbable guest of Dumont’s cinema. (Mickael Gaspar)
Developed over a decade, the first feature of the animator Mariusz Wilczyński shows us well this hurtful and raw recollection. The city of Lodz has a Beckettian and autobiographical atmosphere. An industrial space, filled with smoke, strong rough lights, bizarre characters. The tragic and satirical episodes, like the death and preparation for the funeral of his mother’s corpse, inhabit the labyrinthic memory of the filmmaker.
We know that members of certain religious cults tend to live withdrawn from reality. Kristoffer Borgli (Whateverest, IndieLisboa 2013) film is about one of these young women that had never heard music before. Until this day.
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One of the rare cases in which the title of the film is the synopsis itself. We are witnessing a sociological experience in which a former cult member, who lived isolated from the world, hears music for the first time. And the power of music is enormous and unpredictable. Borgli builds an intelligent and daring comedy, with tragic consequences, which is also a satire on North American society. (Carlos Ramos)
Literal symbolism. In Canapa’s hands, the roots of cinema become slices of black radish on unexposed film. Sonorous explosions of light piercing the photochemical emulsion, a journey to the end of material, the optical unconscious of a cosmological epic.
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Cinema as an experience able to throw us in a trance. A trance as close to the materiality of cinema as possible. Following “A Radical Film” (2017), Stefano Canapa experiments again with black radish on unexposed film to fabricate a sonic and visual symphony of galvanizing intensity. As the film explodes in our faces in black and white and violently morphs untamable patterns into others, one wonders what kind of cosmic body one is being pulled into, if a lunar surface or a black hole. Or is it the cinema screen? (Ana David)
Cinema as God’s nightmare. In this metaphysical comedy, God fears the fall from his superior condition. Fragments from the history of cinema are the hallucinatory mirror of that inferior form, that of being a man.
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God’s Nightmares appropriates imagery of other films, to think about what God’s sleeping images and ideas would be like. An amusing and hallucinated film, driven by editing that finds its sense in God’s weird interior monologue, where the biggest fear is to be just another earthling. (Duarte Coimbra)
Mark Jenkin, that won the festival’s Audience Award in 2019 with Bait, directs a film about the haunting power of creation. A Cornish poet finds a briefcase with her initials. Inside there is a ghost looking for someone to complete his poem.
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A suitcase, a poem, characters that move through chance, and projections, in a game of mirrors and coincidences (the suitcase is responsible). The ghosts wake up and the narrative is composed, fragmented, destroyed, while signs of a curse emerge and multiply in this black drama. The contagion is in the creation, it is in the tide of the ‘‘ wind ’’ that scourges the plans, by the seductive look of Jenkin that cuts and cuts this disturbing and cutting narrative, black and white. (Carlota Gonçalves)
The duo Dornieden and Monroy, also known as OJOBOCA, works fiction and fable from the use of scientific arguments. Here we have the investigation about the Auroch, a species of wild bovine, first documented case of extinction in the seventeen century. With 16 mm film and an inventive use of sound, the disappearance and efforts to recuperate this mythical animal are the starting points for a relationship with an also mythical idea of Europe.
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The Auroch or Uruz is a species of wild cattle that inhabited regions of Europe, Asia and North Africa.
It is considered the ancestor of current domestic cattle and is the first case of extinction to be documented, as a consequence of the high hunting as well as the introduction of modern cattle. The decline and extinction of the last wild aurochs is believed to have occurred in 1627 in the Jaktorów forest, Poland. Although the Auroch is considered a food source, it is distinguished by its physical traits such as strength, speed, endurance and courage. However, these physical traits are intertwined with symbolic powers, derived from a superstition associated with certain members of the animal elements such as the skin of the skull and a cross-shaped bone near the heart being coveted for their magical and supernatural properties.
Her Name Was Europa is Juan David González Monroy and Anja Dorniden’s first feature film and explores, with a clinical eye, the modern attempt to resurrect the aurochs from eternal extinction. (Inês Lima Torres)
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
In his desk at the Brynmor Jones Library, the poet Philip Larkin had a photograph of Guy The Gorilla, a famous attraction at the London Zoo. This Stephen Sutcliffe’s short collage is a meditation on work and how it can be a prison.
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Guy was a London Zoo gorilla famous for his gentle disposition and for receiving sweets from visitors. Here, his inner life is perhaps more similar to that of a detective from a saxophone-soaked eighties noir, who comments vaguely on the human experience. A contrast capable of causing a smile on the stoniest of faces. (Ana Cabral Martins)
Similarly to Éric Rohmer, who always liked to organise his films through series, Piñeiro has also been doing what he calls the “Shakespeareads”. Films that adapt comedies by the English dramaturg to the relationships of a contemporary youth generation. Here the play is Measure for Measure and in its centre is a precise mosaic, of a nonlinear temporality, in which the professional and personal choices of the actress Mariel (María Villar) are being equated.
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Piñeiro’s films are like himself: sober, elegant, distinct and special. Isabella, named after a Shakespearean character, is the aspiration of Mariel who wants to represent her but finds it difficult to concentrate due to financial problems. The film is never simple in its construction and the viewer is invited to unravel the countless possibilities of narrative that each scene gives us. So, who looks at what, as in the magnificent opening where we see a person at the bottom of a small pier and we will review this shot often and in different ways. In Piñeiro’s cinema, the characters take the pain of those who they want to play as if life is nothing more than an acting game, which means a fine and critical thinking about contemporary society. It is not a coincidence that he takes advantage of the Shakespearean universe of great themes to establish a common universal point, and then he is free to speak about what interests him. Its great power is to make things simple and meaningful. (Miguel Valverde)
A young boy dances and imitates Michael Jackson, while listening to the electronic music of Wilbert Gavin. Improvisation, release and energy.
How many emails do we receive as spam and then they turn out to warn us about evil forces in a neighbouring galaxy? How many emails tell us that we have a galactic twin in need of our help? Sasha Svirsky returns to IndieLisboa (Lavo, 2019).
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One day Sasha Svirsky receives an email from her galactic twin brother Galaction asking for help in the fight against evil in a nearby galaxy. First he thinks it’s spam. Then the adventure begins. A brilliant and fun animation, made of explosions of color and a strict chaos of images and rhythm. Seven minutes of pure pleasure. Will it be enough to save the world? (Carlota Gonçalves)
Nga is a tired and old elephant. Sanra, his faithful guide. This could be the beginning of a Disney film. But no. Is this a slow-motion adventure film? Casas will transform the spectator’s gaze into the impassive and serene look of the elephant. It is a journey where man and animal will look for the mythical elephant cemetery, where Nga can finish his days. But this is above all a cosmological film about death, reincarnation and the hypothesis of the non-human.
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Cemetery follows the path of Nga, a Sri Lankan elephant who begins a journey to the sacred elephant cemetery, as planet Earth collapses at the hand of natural catastrophes. In a slow-motion adventure, nature ceases to be the backdrop of human life, and becomes the sensitive, thinking entity that communicates through the sound and visual matter of the film. The radio reports that a violent earthquake has devastated Asia, killing thousands of people. From here, the film begins a three-part journey towards a cosmological understanding of space after the calamity and the consequent extinction of species. Finding the elephant cemetery, plunging into darkness, means starting a kind of rebirth. Themes such as death, reincarnation, immortality are addressed, but also memory, colonialism and the collapse of civilization.
Cemetery is an odyssey about the unknown, the unexplored, this elephant cemetery – perhaps a kind of shangri la. (Inês Lima Torres)
Communicating vessels. A phenomenon in which liquid fills connected containers to the same level, despite its differences in shape. Prized at Rotterdam Film Festival, this film applies the idea to human relationships, in particular teacher and student.
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Based on the works by Dennis Oppenheim, Lygia Clark and Joan Jonas, the film recounts the experience of an experimental film teacher with a female student, interested in performing for the camera. A sweet voice describes and analyzes the result of the exercises, going through a critical history of the beginnings of video performance. Everything becomes more complex when the gestures themselves become a sophisticated metaphor for interpersonal relationships, the teaching of the arts, parenting, alterity and the very act of seeing and … of being. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
