Doclisboa
Cinema
Thursday 15 October · until 25 Oct
The 24th edition of Doclisboa brings documentary cinema to Lisbon for 10 days, with national and international premieres, a retrospective dedicated to Lino Brocka and tributes to names such as Vittorio De Sica and Orson Welles.
Documentary cinema takes centre stage in Lisbon for 10 days, at the 24th edition of Doclisboa. The programme, taking place in several venues, features various national and international premieres and a set of works by established names and new talents in filmmaking, offering a unique and contemporary look at the world. The festival opens with the film Guerrilha no Asfalto, by Edgar Pêra, based on the book of the same name by Manuel Ricardo Sousa, in which the accounts of a former FP-25 operative intersect with his memories of the 1980s. A narrative built between archives, fiction and artificial intelligence. The retrospective of this edition, Lino Brocka, Matem o Artista Nacional, pays tribute to the Filipino director Lino Brocka (1939, 1991), one of the most influential in Asian cinema. His work spans more than 60 films and is closely tied to the social and political reality of the Philippines. During the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Brocka was a central figure of cultural resistance and a defender of freedom of expression, who used cinema as an instrument of denunciation. His films speak of the inequalities, political tensions and desires of a society under construction. The curation of the retrospective is by Filipino artist and filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz, together with the festival's programming team and the Cinemateca Portuguesa. The Portuguese films programmed traverse history, music, literature, thought and memory. Amílcar Cabral is revealed, through his writings, letters and archives, in Amílcar, by Miguel Eek. The daily life of the Casa do Artista is portrayed in Casa do Artista, Não é Permitido Envelhecer, by Solveig Nordlund. The experiences of the city of Lisbon are rethought in O Nosso Último Filme sobre Lisboa, by the collective Left Hand Rotation. Also standing out among the Portuguese productions are Neste Quarto, by Ana Rocha de Sousa, which follows fado singer Carminho on a tour of Japan; and Carta a Uma Jovem Escritora, by Marta Pessoa, which introduces five Portuguese writers whom the filmmaker considers "unjustly forgotten": Olga Gonçalves, Graça Pina de Morais, Maria Cecília Correia, Alice Sampaio and Maria Amélia Neto. Figures who are part of the history of cinema are usually highlighted at Doclisboa. This year, Vittorio De Sica is one of the honoured names in Vittorio De Sica, Staging Life, by Francesco Zippel, a documentary offering an intimate portrait of the Italian director and actor, a precursor of neorealism. The great master and visionary Orson Welles is also presented in Orson Welles: The One-Man Band, a 1995 film directed by Oja Kodar and Vassili Silovic, which brings together rare footage of Welles's unfinished projects. The documentary offers a look at the ideas, dreams and never-completed short films of one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema. Actress Juliette Binoche makes her directorial debut with In-I In Motion, a film in which she revisits her collaboration with dancer and choreographer Akram Khan. In 2007, the two created In-I, a bold work that toured the world. Through previously unseen footage, Binoche reflects on the creative process and her personal transformation. Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist Douglas Gordon is also the central subject of Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon.