Emir Kusturica’s second feature film about the history of Jugoslavia a father who went away, for political reasons, on “a business trip”.)
Secção: Special Screenings
April 1974: two Swiss radio journalists are sent to Portugal to report on Swiss aid in that country. Bob, a technician nearing retirement, accompanies them in his trusty Combi VW. But when they get there, nothing goes to plan: there are tensions between feminist Julie and Cauvin, the wily war reporter. Despite all the best intentions of Pelé, the young Portuguese translator, there is no other option but to abort the mission. But the tide of History ends up blowing the Combi VW right into the heart of the Carnation Revolution.
In early 1985, the writer Nuno Bragança hands his friend Carlos Antunes a 13 question’s questionnaire; 13 sheets of graph paper, of which he offered the recto-verso of each for his friend to answer. The questions were about Carlos Antunes’ personal and political career, with a special interest in his involvement in the Revolutionary Brigades and the armed struggle against the dictatorship that led to his arrest in 1978. The untimely death of the writer, in the same year, left the questionnaire unanswered and some uncertainty as to its purpose. After almost 30 years, the director asks Carlos Antunes to answer the 13 questions and to reconstruct the achievements, illusions and sorrows of the Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal, in the years surrounding the Carnations’ Revolution in 1974.
A documentary about the life and work of musician, composer, poet, actor, activist, columnist, music producer, José Mário Branco, a multitalented man who have been using his songs to transform the country and whose lyrics make as much sense today as they did 40 years ago. The shooting began in 2005 covered seven years of rehearsals, recording, talks and concerts, both in Portugal and France. In this film José Mário Branco talks about music, his convictions, his generation, the dictatorship, the colonial war and his imprisonment and exile. It is the portrait of a man for whom “the song [was always] a weapon.”
Centered in the two-thousand-year-old city of Guimarães, three renowned directors, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway and Edgar Pêra, explore 3D and its evolution in the world of cinema. Greenaway’s Just in Time explores the city’s two millennia of history around the Palace of the Dukes of Braganza. Godard’s video essay The Three Disasters is a journey through the history of cinema, questioning what lies in the future, with 2D possibly becoming obsolete. Pêra’s Cinesapiens explores the role of the viewer in the film going experience, utilizing a group of spectators in a Guimarães movie house.
As we toured through modern Guimarães, the founding city of Portugal, we wondered: What stories does it have to tell? The answer to this question came to us via the voices of four filmmakers with unique visions of cinema, Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa, Victor Erice and Manoel de Oliveira, who worked together in the making of this film, each contributing with a short. Things are not what they seem at first: the multiple dimensions of the story are generated by both reality ‚ Erice’s documentary Vidros Partidos ‚ and fiction – Kaurismäki’s O Tasqueiro, Costa’s Sweet Exorcist, and Oliveira’s O Conquistador Conquistado.
In 1999, Alcatel laid Southeast Asia’s first optical fiber cable, which crosses Cambodia from Thailand. This installation project provided several months of employment for many Cambodians, especially those from rural areas facing uncertain economic conditions. This documentary illustrates the hardships, dignity, and wit of these workers while providing insight into the social and economic contradictions facing contemporary Cambodia.
Six o’clock in the morning and Rafa finds out his mother is under arrest. On a friend’s bike he crosses the bridge and goes to a police station in downtown Lisbon to see her and wait for her release. Time goes by. But Rafa doesn’t want to return home alone.
“A presentation of one of the six chapters of a long Atlantic film, still in construction, that began in 2007, and that follows the contemporary life of the smaller and most isolated Azores’ island, the Corvo. We arrived by boat just like the ancient, a m
Macário spends an entire train journey to the Algarve talking to a woman he doesn’t know about the trials and tribulations of his love life: straight after starting his first job as an accountant at his Uncle Francisco’s warehouse in Lisbon, he falls madly in love with a young blonde, who lives across the road. The two soon get to know each other and, before long, a wedding is on the cards. His uncle forbids the marriage, fires him and kicks him out of the house. Macário departs for Cape Verde where he makes his fortune. When he finally wins his uncle’s approval to marry his beloved, he discovers the “singularity” of his fiancée’s character.
Nuno Teotónio Pereira is mostly known as an architect. But throughout his career he was also many other things. Even if in all of those things he never ceased being an architect. And if all of those things always end up leading to the architect he is. This “portrait” of Nuno Teotónio Pereira doesn’t intend to be more than a introduction to his life and work, knowing that a whole life won’t fit in one movie.
Hermínio liked to share his secrets. Trás-os-Montes was a secret, as was Lisbon’s nightlife. The food was a secret, just like the wine and the cigars. His friends were a secret, as were the poets, who were also his friends. And the books were the biggest secret of all. He unveiled all of them at Assírio & Alvim.
When Dan gets out of jail, he goes in search of Alex.
The architect Raul Lino (1879-1974) left an essential work on the Portuguese understanding of the ways of being and living. The film deals with this legacy based upon his published texts. They set the problematic of the House in a much larger context than the one related to the simple problems of its edification.
Women.Wave is a film about silences. Maria is plunged in loss and absence. She has decided to become the only fisher woman of a comunity taking the place of her deceased brother. She transforms herself and lives like a man. Women.Wave is a journey to the places of uncertainty and death.
Named after a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown, Jarman’s kaleidoscopic 6th feature is a meditation on the decline of the English culture in the 1980’s. Shot in Super-8mm, with the camera often hand-held, it combines home movies of Jarman’s family, a documentary record of industrial and ecological ruin and portrays signs of struggle: a punk walks through a landscape of destruction; a baby lies in a carriage with newspapers proclaiming imminent doom; a bride lies dressed in tatters; a terrorist and a naked man embrace on a bed with bottles and guns around them; a voice on the soundtrack invokes Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. An apocalyptical and lyrical vision of Tatcher’s Britain.
My device is a part of my body and I never treated an object as well as it. It’s like if I removed a fake arm and left it in the table to paint its nails. That’s how I regard my body.
A portrait of António Campos, an extraordinary cineaste that was called an amateur, one of the most unique Portuguese directors due to the way he filmed the country on the 1960 and 1970’s. Considered as a director out of the mainstream, a loner, instinctive, Campos stands for the passion of filming.