A short film from the 1960s, a production by Francisco de Castro, Albufeira is a promotional film encouraging tourism in the Algarvian city (as is Lisboa, Jardim da Europa), showing, however, the authorial and experimental touch of António Macedo, one of the founders of the Portuguese Cinema Novo, who was always inclined to escape constrictions of production. This screening taks place within the project FILMar, operated by Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, with the finantial support of the EEAGrants 2020-2024 program
João Botelho brings Alexandre O’Neill back to the silver screen after Um Adeus Português. In a film with a penchant for the musical and the oneiric, the cast includes Pedro Lacerda, Inês Castel-Branco, Claudio da Silva, Crista Alfaiate, Rita Blanco, Luis Lima Barreto, Soraia Chaves, Joana Santos, Gabriela Barros, Maya Booth, Vera Moura , Maria João Pinho, Dinarte Branco, Pedro Diogo, Isabel Zuaa, Joana Botelho, among others.
Sita Valles was born in Angola, in 1951, but studied Medicine in Lisbon, where she became a communist student leader. After 1974, and because she considered that the revolution in Portugal had no future, she left for Angola and joined the MPLA, the liberation movement. Sita died at the age of 26, in 1977, in circumstances which have not been fully clarified. Testimonies of political figures who crossed paths with her tell us about her life.
This screening will be followed by a debate moderated by Marta Lança.
The revolutionary Álvaro Cunhal, symbol of Portuguese communism and political giant of the 20th century. He is nothing less than a larger-than-life figure, now examined by João Botelho’s camera, in a detective-minded film, in which the early years of the life of the historic leader of the Portuguese Communist Party are explored. In between, excerpts from his own books are staged for the spectator.
Maria Lamas became known as a Portuguese feminist political activist, as well as a translator and journalist, who wrote a fundamental work, As Mulheres do Meu País, which intimately and meticulously portrayed the conditions of women in Portugal, in the late 1940s. The film is about the process of writing this book (through the estate, the diaries), but also a reflection on Lamas herself as a figure of Portuguese feminism.
The journey in question is that of Pedro IV of Portugal and Pedro I of Brazil, the king who became known as the “Liberator”, for having given Brazil its independence. We find him returning to the small country by the sea from where he fled from the invading French troops, to now dispute the Portuguese crown with his brother. Tarnished by the glorious past and the uncertain present, he is a man with no place in the world, in search of a new purpose.
A film that walks through Lisbon as a documentary, but what it really wants is to fly over the Tagus River in full fictional mode, in order to explore the south bank, from where it sets off on an adventure from Alentejo to the Algarve. The narrator is Luis Miguel Cintra and the force in motion is Marcello Urgeghe’s fugitive criminal. This screening taks place within the project FILMar, operated by Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, with the finantial support of the EEAGrants 2020-2024 program.
In the 1950s, Victor Palla and Manuel Costa, two architect friends, portrayed the city of Lisbon in more than 6000 photographs. These are published in an eponymous book circulated in installments, during Salazar’s regime, but forgotten during the following half century. After their deaths, it became the Portuguese photobook with the greatest international reach ever and this film is a tribute to the work of these two figures, which is now 100 years old.
The Nasser brothers’ second feature film takes place in contemporary Gaza. At 60, Issa is a curmudgeonly, but secretly charming, solitary fisherman. He is in love with Sihma, a woman who works at the market, but he doesn’t have the courage to tell her. Until the day he discovers a phallic statue of the god Apollo and his life changes. A film that combines absurd comedy, magical realism and the spirit of Italian neo-realism in a unique recipe.
A meeting between the artist Welket Bungué and Joacine Katar Moreira, an independent parliamentary member. The focus is on what is essential and revolutionary in their respective works. Includes paintings by plastic artist Nú Barreto and music by Mû Mbana.
Two (but are they two?) beings, with faces wrapped in gauze and clearly out of their own Time and Space, take advantage of their stay in Lisbon to reflect on colonialism, social inequality and other key topics.
A Vermelha/ The Red was Vila Franca de Xira, so named by PIDE, during the time of the Estado Novo. This film brings us echoes of a city that contained a multiplicity of places — whether private or institutional houses — used by the antifascist resistance of the era. These, and those responsible for them, are now revisited and interviewed.
A city is a complex concept. This documentary focuses on the figure of Nuno Portas, one of the great Portuguese urban planners, who believed that an architectural project did not end at a building’s doorstep.
Sérgio Tréfaut returns to Brazil to film the public gardens of the Palácio do Catete, the former official residence of the presidents of Brazil that today houses the Museum of the Republic. Before the pandemic, this place of leisure was also a meeting point for the Seresta guys, a group of elderly people with a love for Brazilian singing and music that this film pays tribute to.
An animated documentary that tells the story of Amin, who, before marrying his boyfriend, decides to reveal a secret he has been hiding for twenty years. Amin arrived in Denmark as a refugee from Afghanistan. In this movie, he deals with his traumatic past.
A look at the intimate writing of the artist couple Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Árpád Szenes, through an exhaustive documentation of the couple’s life in the period depicted. João Mário Grilo picks up where José Álvaro de Morais left off.
Musician and DJ (and composer and journalist, among others) Questlove signs — in his own name, as Ahmir Khalib Thompson — this documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. The festival lasted six weeks and featured performances by Stevie Wonder and Sly and the Family Stone. But it got lost in the collective memory.
