Playlist
<p>A protest told from the perspective of the oppressors. In 1970s Poland, rising prices caused workers to strike and street protests grew, creating unbearable tension. The viewer is, however, listening to telephone conversations (which paint the picture of the moment with the help of animations) of the men that are deciding how to suppress the rebellion.</p>
<p>A trip to the countryside could not be a better plan for a romantic getaway. Just the couple, their bikes and a whole day to enjoy. Except when a storm comes and everything turns into a disaster. The only chance is to face it all together.</p>
<p>A month after the night that changed the lives of a group of teenagers, the police ask them to reenact a traumatic circumstance by a lake.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This story is about a mother who has given so much that it looks like she has nothing left… but life opens up new opportunities.</p>
<p>A Japanese avant-garde film that is a poem-made-cinema for its use of surrealist imagery, presenting a sensual look at the human body.</p>
<p>An adorable little husky that is the very spirit of the Alaskan Peninsula, with a shadow that is no shadow but actual Northern Lights. Now all he needs is a friend.</p>
<p>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</p>
<p>In liberative fashion, or apotheotic exorcism, a collage of moments of male sexual pleasure.</p>
<p>Among domestic animals, a month is spent in the countryside, in the south of France. A group of friends rents a house and enjoy the summer.</p>
<p>The intriguing presentation of a series of objects — such as white plastic chairs — that are placed before the spectator before being destroyed in unusual ways, as with trees collapsing on top of them.</p>
<p>A trans woman and a man meet on the streets of Lisbon. They come from different realities but soon find common ground, challenging and laughing their way into each other's arms.</p>
<p>Courtney Barnett, a leading figure in Australian contemporary rock and usually very private, is the focus of this intimate, almost suffocating, portrait of an artist who reveals herself in all her vulnerability and anxiety. Danny Cohen takes out his 16mm camera to follow Barnett over three years — on tour and in the studio, recording her latest album — as she narrates the documentary herself, through small audio notes that punctuate the film.</p>
<p>Nothing is more auspicious for a young couple than a pay rise. When they move into a larger apartment, however, the husband is rendered disabled and unable to work. The wife needs to get a job quickly and with the bills pilling up, an unusual proposal appears and, succumbing, she is faced with the unromantic reality of sex work.</p>
<p>A robotic voice guides us through archival footage accompanying a hypnotic flashback procedure, creating a dream that takes place during surgery.</p>
<p>The director is close to a nudist beach with his camera, looking for someone who wants to be filmed. The search is not easy.</p>
<p>The first roughie by Doris Wishman, with sexuality as a central subject, is a rape and revenge film, a subgenre of exploitation cinema. In this film, Gigi Darlene is Meg, a housewife who flees Boston for New York after killing the doorman of her building while he tried to rape her. Structured by a long dream sequence, the film follows Meg through several other encounters as she tries to escape prison.</p>
<p>Mirene and André, and Carl and Vicente, are two couples in their thirties. While Mirene and André struggle with their infertility, Vicente decides to undergo an experimental technique, implanting an ovary in his body in the hope of having a child with Carl. A marital drama with speculative overtones, “Becoming a Man in the Middle Ages” is an intimate story about queer sexuality, autonomy, reproductive desires and the ghosts of normativity.</p>
<p>Ara has always believed she will vanish when she turns 28 years old. As her birthday approaches, she submerges in the most fundamental sensations of existence. A masterful debut film from director-writer Ágata de Pinho, whose performance leads her character from trauma to catharsis in the most beautiful way.</p>
<p>A documentary by Manuel Mozos about the spaces that capture the narratives of the marginalized. Whether madmen or criminals, they are all those who existed delimited and separated: in forts, in prisons, in hospitals or asylums. Their time passed, but the spaces remain.</p>
<p>A video composed of sound and visual sampling of news from around the world, made in collaboration with Painè Cuadrelli.</p>
<p>In the midst of a particularly sparkling Mother Nature, there are specters that wander, keeping forgotten rituals alive.</p>
<p>The mother of writer Félix Bruzzone disappeared in 1976 from Campo de Mayo, one of the main clandestine detention centers of the then established Argentinian dictatorship. Today, it is one of the largest military units in the country. Bruzzone is determined to find someone to help him explore this space, a symbol of a very particular and also collective pain — his experiences inspire Jonathan Perel, who accompanies him.</p>
<p>With a fun deadpan humour, the Gardells have to change the way they experience their farm and resort to the possibility of embarking on the world of agricultural tourism.</p>
<p>It is through an exploration of home movies that the director revisits his childhood, through a lens that questions gender identity, without recognizing who he was.</p>
<p>The “barefoot diva”, the iconic Cesária Évora in a documentary that shows never-before-seen footage and offers a never-before-explored view of the life of the Cape Verdean singer who, though not corresponding to the normal model of success, was able to overcome all the conditions that would normally keep her out of the limelight. This is the story of a black African woman, over fifty years old and from a poor background, whose only dream was to be free.</p>
<p>The town of Churchill, Canada, becomes a hotspot for polar bears from October to November. This fact gives rise to both tourism, the possibility of seeing a bear up close, and unexpected attacks, blurring the line between civilized and wild.</p>
<p>An exploration of the identity of the woman as a lesbian, which mixes the materiality of the film with the tangibility of the female body, creating an aesthetic of its own.</p>
<p>The satire couldn’t be clearer about Hong Kong’s housing problems, its high prices and the conditions it puts those without means. Hence the “coffin houses” that give its name to this black comedy, which winks at the insufficiency of square meters, as well as at this fictional predicament regarding people who assent to live in haunted houses. Full of exacerbated violence, an anthological film with several stories to tell.</p>
<p>Phantasms and screens—enter the burrows of a teenager’s psyche in this bracingly original hybrid film by French auteur Bertrand Bonello.</p> <p>An 18-year-old spends the pandemic lockdown trapped with her thoughts, FaceTiming friends, and consuming YouTube videos by an alluring life guru peddling bizarre devices as well as ideas on how to “live better”. Different realities and worlds, desires and projections, bleed into one another in a fever dream where meaning is but a thwarted attempt at existence.</p> <p>Bookended by a letter to the filmmaker’s own teenage daughter, Coma was produced during the lockdown which spurred even greater creativity in terms of formal experimentation with the use of animation and found footage. Resisting interpretation, Coma is a daring work that reveals the impossibility of a totalising reality—especially in a teenage girl’s head.</p>
<p>"Constant" is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. “Constant” asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.</p>
<p>In the back room of a small supermarket in suburban Moscow, a modest wedding is being celebrated. A harmonious community of immigrant workers, you might think. But Mukhabbat’s face looks troubled. The Uzbek is an immigrant worker at “Produkty 24”. Despite being pregnant, she toils day and night in cramped conditions as a member of a pseudo-family of labourers under the iron rule of shop owner Zhanna. Those who disobey or even try to run away are brutally abused. Meanwhile, the police look the other way and even join in, helping themselves to anything in the shop – even the people – free of charge. But then, when not just Mukhabbat’s passport but the most important thing in her life is taken away from her, she decides to break free.<br /> Michael Borodin’s debut feature film is a daring and alarming journey into that heart of darkness called modern slavery. As we accompany his reticent heroine from the claustrophobic gloom of the Russian metropolis to the white expanse of the director’s Uzbek homeland, the film turns from horror story into road trip, and shows us, at times surreally, the reality of life in the new Russia. It is based on the true case of the so-called “Golyanovo slaves” which came to light in 2016 and remains a thorn in the side of Russian justice and politics. This film could save lives</p>
<p>Jorge de Sena went into exile to Brazil and later to the United States. Although he never returned to Portugal, he maintained an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. Given the political circumstances, the letters — and the film — offer their thoughts on the period of the Portuguese fascist regime, but above all, they are a testament to the affinity between two poets, what keeps them connected and their love for the written word.</p>
<p>If cinema is a machine that generates empathy, as Roger Ebert said, this is evidence of that. There are few words in this documentary by Andrea Arnold (American Honey, Big Little Lies), her first foray into the genre, but they’re not really necessary. We follow the life of cow Luma in a mechanised farm environment, since her early calf-hood to the end of her life. Images of animal treatment that may be considered sensitive.</p>
<p>The first of two films by Doris Wishman with burlesque performer Chesty Morgan as Crystal, a woman who uses unusual methods to exact revenge on the mobsters who killed her boyfriend. By seducing each one, she incapacitates her victims and suffocates them with her breasts. A brief clip appears in the film Serial Mom, by John Waters.</p>
<p>An appropriation-of-an-appropriation of videos from Instagram, YouTube, video games and public archives that (re)compose wrecked memories.</p>
<p>The detours from the title are more like treasure-hunts to which Denis subjects his clients, who only want the stashes of drugs he’s hiding in the melancholic landscapes of Moscow. Everywhere is a place he could add to this game, although we lose sight of this naughty guide to visit other figures that populate the city. Between the anonymity of the Darknet and policing and oppression, this city contains multiple dimensions.</p>
<p>In one of the director’s first nudie cuties, the nudist colony is the right starting point to explore the possibility of showing many people naked on screen. It is the opening of this controversial colony that leads a journalist to infiltrate it, hoping to denounce the premises. Circumstances quickly change and the journalist becomes a nudist.</p>
<p>A domestic tragedy leaves the animals without their owner and ignites a struggle between the heart and instinct.</p>
<p>As a result of a pandemic, Ico Costa leaves a camera with Ailucha and Domy. What we see is their daily life in Inhambane, where these young Mozambicans live their youth.</p>
<p><em>Dream Work</em> does not so much present dream content than filmic methods of representation corresponding to Freudian dream work: mechanisms of displacement and condensation are seen in relation to figurative elements found in Tscherkassky’s source material. Tscherkassky processes these in a manner that resembles Freud’s description of the compression (Pressung) of dream thoughts that takes place in the work of dreams, whereby “components are turned, crumble, and get pushed together, like drift ice”.<br /> <em>(Christa Blümlinger)</em><br /> <br /> Just like in a real dream, <em>Dream Work</em> does not contain individual and unconnected images; although each image is radically arbitrary, the context is so compelling that an alternative is inconceivable. <em>(Bert Rebhandl)</em></p>
<p>Léa tells the story of the Gasolineiras de Kebradas as it echoes through the walls of Colmeia, the women’s prison of Brasilia: “In 2019, I got involved with my sister Chitara in this crazy scheme she was caught up in. She had bought some land in a favela—oil pipes ran right under it, so she built this huge structure, tapped the oil, and started refining it right there and was making a lot of money. She set up a deal with the motoboys, so they would buy gas from her. She also had a stand at the market where she would sell it. Chitara also got mixed up in politics. She made history.”</p>
<p>France, summer 1944. A public humiliation of women who are accused of having had affairs with the enemy.</p>
<p>The second work of “The A.I.D.S. Trilogy,” a set of three short films commenting on the context in which it emerged, the HIV crisis in America. Crossing segments of Jean Genet's film “Un Chant d’Amour” with explicit pornographic images, Tartaglia explores the dynamics of the observed and the observer, to create an almost-manifesto that embodies what was concealed, condemned, and suppressed by the hysteria of the stigma.</p>
<p>Four people take an elevator. But how they behave when they’re alone (putting on lipstick or dancing a bit) and how they behave when they’re all together are two completely different things.</p>
<p>Two twin sisters take a trip and make considerations about their proximity, how it affects the way they identify and on their own individuality.</p>
<p>This is a work made from films that the director collected, anonymous or amateur by nature, and which he now uses to design a look that encompasses his own life, his family stories, as well as a (clear) obsession with cinema (and sex). A portrait between fiction and reality, between the endearing and the narcissistic, haunted by past loves but full of joie de vivre.</p>
<p>A film with a daring musical vein that seeks to distinguish the night experiences of a group of friends from this place of alienation, exclusivity and consumption that is the “club”. There’s nothing more important than defiance against the system—especially when it’s practiced with friends.</p>
<p>In the slot machine of capitalism, it’s not things but consumption itself that is our god.</p>
<p>"To stay, or to go? A question many young Haitians grapple with, as the situation in Haiti deteriorates and the violence gets worse. So does Freda, an anthropology student from a poor neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince. Her boyfriend leaves for Santo Domingo. She is unsure whether she should give up her family and her belief in the future of her country. In the meantime, her sister is trying to move up the social ladder by bleaching her skin, her brother moves to Chile, and her mother tries to keep herself and her shop afloat. In her fiction debut, documentary filmmaker Gessica Généus shows the Haitian community from the inside, with an emphasis on a female perspective within a patriarchal society. Against a backdrop of religion and colonialism, activist discussions and street protests – featured in documentary footage – it is mainly the actors who set the tone in this stirring sketch of complex situations, intimate personal relationships, and painful moments. Largely Creole-spoken and developed with support from the Hubert Bals Fund."</p>
<p>Doriane is thirteen and has a first boyfriend. But she also has a friend insisting that she has to try a french kiss. What’s the right way to do it, anyway?</p>
<p>The film deals with the problem of growing anger, frustration and aggression that seeks an outlet. The heroine of the film is a person who loses control of her anger. Losing herself in emotions, she cannot stand the tension. The animation shows suppressed anger and imaginary physical violence. It refers to commonly formulated thoughts or intentions: my blood is flooding ... my nerves are choking, I will tear him to shreds .... I am about to kill someone .... etc. An important element reflecting the character of the animation is frugal but expressive plasticity that uses organic dense lines and appropriately expressive color. Natural sounds (like broken bones and injured body parts) enhance the naturalistic message of emotions.</p>
<p>“Houston, Texas: oil, sex, alcohol and drugs”. This is the setting for Nicolas Peduzzi’s documentary, which follows Alexandra, Will and Nate as they try to survive in a city that likes to devour dreams, especially those of an ex-gang leader or of a rich boy disowned due to his addiction. In the background, the coming hurricane isn’t a metaphor at all.</p>
<p>Glass Life is a dynamic configuration of images and video accumulated over the years on the artist’s hard drives. From her studio, the artist uses her computer and various studio set-ups to make sense of her visual archive – and the world outside. Luscious pictures of food, political figures, screen idols, sportswomen, Instagram models, grand artworks, cartoon characters, emojis and self-portraits, among many other images, vie for our attention. A dizzying navigation through our consumerist visual world.</p>
<p>After arriving in heaven, Jerome goes on a search for his wife Maryline. In his search, he dives into a surreal and colourful world in which nobody seems to be able to help him.</p>
<p>The director creates a collage, between filmed images, superimposed animations and a multi-voice narrative that takes us through an exploration of age and growing pains.</p>
<p>A guard’s duty is to keep his post. Not abandoning it is his duty, his honor, his pride. Come rain or shine. Until a natural disaster interferes with this priority</p>
<p>In a school, in a small village, the kids do Physical Education in a cold winter environment. And something goes wrong while Raffi teaches the class.</p>
<p>Two witty, sweet and confused men become friends because they don't have anything be\er to do. Their day oscillates between small talk, existen>al crisis and dubious male rites of passage, whilst wandering the woods surrounding Oslo, in search of a suitable place to camp - in the middle of winter.</p>
<p>In the midst of a heatwave of insanity, two children find a way to cool everyone down! A playful stop motion short film animated using a hybrid technique that includes cut outs, clay animation and thousands of replacement pieces.</p>
<p>Astronauts have as a mission to go where no one has been before and discover the unknown. Because everything is alien, or strange, until we get to know it better.</p>
<p>In the film the author shows hierophany in a symbolic way - the manifestation of holiness in the world, described by the historian and philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade. The author presents an oneiric vision bordering on waking, dreaming and psychedelic experiences. "Hierophany" is a fantasy about the beginning - of the world? human? myth? religion? culture? - a journey into an imaginary world that does not require unambiguous interpretation.</p>
<p>Strange bleeds and healing powers. Here are the ingredients of a family of Filipino women in Greece. Emy and Teresa’s mother returned to the archipelago while the daughters stayed in Athens, supported by the Catholic and Filipino community that welcomed them. When Teresa becomes pregnant, Emy must deal with her family’s connection to mysterious forces. Is it religion, mysticism or magic?</p>
<p>A father films his daughter every year on her birthday, asking her the exact same questions, capturing the moving, tender journey from childhood to womanhood.</p>
<p>A couple find solace in each other amid an alienating existence where hope at times feels out of reach as despair threatens to overwhelm.</p> <p>As 16-year-old Marusya contemplates ending her life, she meets Kimi at a gig. The two kindred spirits discover the possibility of happiness despite a difficult existence. Filming over the next 12 years in what they call the ‘Depression Federation’, the pair traverse Moscow music subcultures while battling drug abuse and depression.</p> <p>Against the backdrop of autocratic Russia and alienating social conditions, we see the transformations of the couple and their life paths. Through the careful editing of home videos and street footage, the documentary recounts their joys and struggles with bracing honesty and emotional intensity. If there was an emblematic film to Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, this would be it.</p>
<p>While the bear parents are away, their cubs stay at home with the sheep. The bear cubs play merrily with a ball of yarn, but soon get all tangled up, and everything is turned upside down! The film is based on the traditional Latvian lullaby “Hush Hush Little Bear”.</p>
<p>A documentary seen through the eyes of the filmmaker as a child, Pegah tells us about Gholam, an important family friend whose absence still marks her life. The charm of nostalgia is transformed with the confrontation with a reality that deals with the Iranian revolution.</p>
<p>From visionary director Quentin Dupieux, a quirky comedy fantasy about middle-aged house hunters who find more in a suburban bargain buy than anyone could have dreamed. For what Alain and Marie discover in their new basement could well change their lives forever. An absurdist meditation on the cruelties of ageing? A droll Buñuelian satire on the world of bourgeois property ownership? Or a giddy time travel metaphysical wonder? All you need to know is that the incredible Incredible but True is another bizarre Dupieux masterpiece and another amazing addition to his wacky oeuvre.</p>
<p>A sexploitation film with a hint of the supernatural. Zeb has an unhealthy attachment to Ann, and when he discovers artefacts with voodoo powers that allow him to control the object of his obsession, the young girl cannot escape this maddening, abusive game.</p>
<p>A mosaic composed by the windows of a building, allowing a look at the lives of those who inhabit it and their everyday moments, in a polychromatic symphony.</p>
<p>The twins Rebecca and Carlo are reunited at their grandmother’s house, which they will have to dismantle following her death. The days they spend together bring forth their affections and their conflicts.</p>
<p>Without Italo Disco, no house music, no Chemical Brothers, no Daft Punk, right? Which illustrates how jaunty youth music can age with great dignity. With plenty of fun facts, this documentary offers an excursion back to an epoch when millions of Europeans indulged in synthesisers, catchy melodies, and bizarre English lyrics. It was a German record producer who came up with the genre label. With an appropriate mix of seriousness and irony, the comments are delivered by international trendwatchers, sociologists, and of course the pioneers themselves.</p>
<p>This is a cute but silly camel who can’t handle his itchy hump. But when he finds a basketball in the desert, he won’t even think about anything else.</p>
<p>A film that uses images from family archives to highlight the testimonies of children coming from Austria to Portugal, in the post-Second World War period. This reflection on a migration from an area marked by war, to another without the traces of that same destruction, gives space for dominant narratives to be confronted with first-hand experiences. The film proposes to look at a past that may resonate in the present.</p>
<p>After bringing us Bobby Pinwheel last year, Robert Kleinschmidt is back with his eccentric stop motion adventures. This animated festival deals with topics such as isolation, alcoholism and rotting teeth. Classic Kleinschmidt.</p>
<p>A film that presents itself as a comic attempt to satirise the adult film industry, which features Sammy Petrillo, a comedian and Jerry Lewis impersonator from the 50s, then in decline.</p>
<p>A tender film set in a South Korea represented as dominated by consumption and capitalism, but where the character Jung-hee is able to maintain a relatively strong self-esteem. Her unattached situation (she is not at university, nor does she have a steady job) leads her to want to visit Kim Min-Young, a former high school classmate, and resume their relationship.</p>
<p>After her younger brother is the victim of a flood, Bea can’t look at the water as anything other than a source of fear. Her father uses his ingenuity to try to create something important. Father and daughter have different reactions to loss, but they will have to overcome it together.</p>
<p>Laurent Garnier is described as being the Pope or “a DJ’s DJ”. This documentary offers an insight into the long career of the French DJ and producer, one of the biggest names in the techno music explosion of the 90s. A walk through dance floors so full of people dancing that it rains with the condensation resulting from the heat.</p>
<p>A group of forest animals secretly collect parts from abandoned bicycles, with the intention of making vehicles adapted to their size. They are preparing for a great race!</p>
<p>Leaving the model of roughies and nudie cuties, Doris Wishman directs a documentary (with situational dramatisations) that focuses on the lives of transgender people, speaking to folks like Deborah Hartin, transgender rights activist, and Dr. Leo Wollman, who assisted the transition of several people and wrote the first care protocols in these cases, among others.</p>
<p>The colonial war separates António, a doctor integrated in the Portuguese army in eastern Angola, from his wife. The thread that unites them are the letters he writes to her, as he sees the horror of war and falls in love with the African continent.</p>
<p>The first film directed by actress Kinuyo Tanaka, the second woman to make a career behind the camera in Japan. A post-war romantic film in which Reikichi Mayumi, a poet that experienced World War II, begins working as a writer of love letters for other people. Newly restored 4K copy screening for the first time.</p>
<p>One day, out of nowhere, a giant Rock lays in the middle of the peaceful little village where Luce lives. The villagers can’t even open the door to their houses anymore! Luce is angry: go away Rock, you don’t belong here! And why are you here anyway?</p>
<p>This is a world without loneliness because everyone has a double, a version of oneself that is never too far away. But living in this world without loneliness is also living in a world without individuality, and Lucienne will have to choose between conformity and ostracization.</p>
<p>A couple watch two friends on their way to a party.</p>
<p>A filmic contemplation on the use of masks, the faces of our loved ones and the rituals we create to feel connected to what comes after death.</p>
<p>Mariana is 21 and lives in a religious community, where she does her best to be the ideal woman: beautiful and docile. In the evenings, she and her friends express their religiosity in other ways. In town, they hunt down women with looser morals and teach them a lesson. When Mariana no longer fits the perfect picture herself, however, her belief is shaken.</p>
<p>This documentary, based on the book of the same name by Lizzy Goodman, brings to the cinema the rebirth of rock’n’roll in the first decade of the 2000s, after 9/11, with the explosion of bands such as The Strokes, LCD SoundSystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio or Interpol. These bands and the alchemy of music they made in those years transformed New York and influenced a generation globally. For those who remember Napster, Vice and hipsters.</p>
<p>A cinematic portrait of filmmaker Miles McKane, by Yann Beauvais, both Light Cone founders.</p>
<p>Grandson and grandmother perform the gestures of a rural ballad about an encounter with death.</p>
<p>An immigrant mother, hurting from a backache, calls for her son to help carry her groceries home. Along their way, they talk about the future through the past, revisiting all of their hardships and hopes.</p>
<p>Why is the night changing the day? Well, when you don’t like something, you change it.</p>
<p>With skillful threads, natural disasters are sewn alongside very human disasters. Humor, death, fear are the keys to this composition.</p>
<p>A musical that has as its literal unsung heroes those who make home deliveries, usually through apps that don’t see the well-being of employees as a priority. The motto is a simple dream: buying a motorcycle, so that the work is made easier.</p>
<p>A slightly naive paradise bird is going out of his way to attract a mate.</p>
<p>Letters from Chantal Akerman’s mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection.</p>
<p>There’s no room for subtle metaphors when you can be so blissfully direct. A tribute film to other classics, including John Carpenter’s They Live, about misogyny and gender dynamics. It all starts when Venla discovers a pair of glasses with very special characteristics.</p>
<p>It’s hard to find our own place in the world when we’re young, and the ideas we have about what we have to do to be accepted aren’t necessarily the best ones — this is a disconnection that Margo is dealing with.</p>
<p>Nosferasta: First Bite is a vampire movie like no other. Christopher Columbus uses his undead powers to create his “New World”, where he sucks the blood out of his colonial project for centuries. Complicit in this is Oba – both co-writer and star of the film – a shipwrecked African slave who, once bitten, becomes Columbus’s subject and collaborator. When Oba discovers Rastafarianism, his allegiance changes. A tale as old as time, but filtered through a cloud of smoke.</p>
<p>“Cooking is caring” and this is an ode to one of the most affectionate gestures. An animation that takes us through the preparation of a meal, from coriander soup to hake dumplings, and the playful dynamics this familiar (and familial) routine provides.</p>
<p>Sinead O’Connor. The name conjures up an image of a girl with a shaved head, or a girl tearing up a photograph of the then Pope, John Paul II, or a singer who has been pushed out of the spotlight of pop music for her uncompromising personality. Through a contemporary feminist lens, this documentary looks at a five-year period, linking the singer’s career to the complex and eventful past of Ireland, where she was born.</p>
<p>Doris Wishman goes where no woman has gone before and transports sexploitation to the surface of the Moon in a sensual science fiction film, as if Star Trek had arrived with the wrong coordinates. When Dr. Jeff Huntley receives an inheritance he begins to build a rocket ship with the help of his mentor Dr. Nichols, in order to travel to the Earth’s satellite. In a Florida-turned-Moon, they encounter a sensual (and telepathic) alien community.</p>
<p>How easy is it to bake a cake when you have eight arms? But this octopus will discover that her arms can have their ideas too — and that’s a good thing.</p>
<p>Two octopuses help each other in a comical escape from the grasp of a stubborn restaurant cook. However, even after overcoming insurmountable odds, they see that their fight to stay together is not over.</p>
<p>Omar, who belongs to a circus because of his crablike hands, has long since accepted his sad fate at the hands of the despot Mr. Jules. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel embodied by Pincette, a mermaid tightrope walker that’ll transform his life.</p>
<p>Five friends leave for an adventurous vacation on the Alentejo coast. But their path leads them close to someone Rita longs for but fears to meet again.</p>
<p>In a continuous travelling, one cautiously advances towards the city, navigating through dim lights and neons that pierce an unusual night. The darkness hints at dreamlike moments that gradually materialize into staged elements and fanciful visions of a roadside landscape.</p>
<p>An exploration of Portuguese emigration and its materialization in an object imbued with ideas of success. In this documentary, the director travels 2000km to people who have left Portugal in search of a new life. The car is the starting and meeting point for a discussion around symbolism, identity and community.</p>
<p>Patouille is a little creature who lives in harmony with the plants. With his friend Momo, he discovers the amazing features of plants.</p>
<p>Beware of pearfall. It happens suddenly, we need to be prepared.</p>
<p>As the proverb says, “an exhausted snake has sharp teeth, but blurred vision”. Pedro is an electrician who lives in a remote village until the day a tragic accident occurs. To escape serious trouble, he runs away, but doesn’t go far. The village’s pardon, however, will not be easy to obtain.</p>
<p>Pablo still hasn’t fulfilled his dream of being an actor in a film, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to pay the rent. His solution, for now, is to be a “simulated” patient in medical schools, to train future doctors, and in alternative therapy sessions. It’s urgent that he gets out of this rut. When his housemate disappears, leaving a ghost behind, Pablo rolls up his sleeves to take charge of his life.</p>
<p>Hazel is a suis generis life coach who will help Helen overcome her fears.</p>
<p>A collaborative work by the filmmakers An van. Dienderen (Belgium), Rosine Mbakam (Cameroon) and Éleonore Yameogo (Burkina Faso) that explores their different perspectives as filmmakers and their different experiences, as a result of their skin color. The film is divided into three parts, each of which is the responsibility of one of the directors, but the dialogue between the trio is made through recordings where they discuss opinions, conclusions and even lighting techniques.</p>
<p>This is the story of a kiss and an internal storm. It’s also a story about desire and the first time we’re close to someone we wish was closer.</p>
<p>Joey Bernstein, an old friend of the narrator, has a single obsession: finding traces of Punctured Sky, an old computer game whose mere mention seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Thus begins an investigation that tests the limits of digital memory.</p>
<p>A horror film director with an addiction problem receives a mysterious package from Pedro, his ex-girlfriend’s cousin, who sends him an audio cassette, a roll of film and a key to his apartment. Both have a passion for cinema, but Pedro is paranoid with the idea of it being the end of him. Newly restored 4K copy screening for the first time in Portugal.</p>
<p>No voice and no text, only the power of image and montage. Francisco Noronha builds a portrait of the surroundings of Lisbon as seen by Portuguese cinema, with images from The Green Years by Paulo Rocha (1963) to O Fim do Mundo by Basil da Cunha (2020). In between, there are images of films by Manuel Mozos, João Salaviza and sprinklings of Italian neorealism.</p>
<p>We meet a girl who inhabits a red world and is tired of always seeing the same palette. When she can spy new and eye-catching colors, she sets off on an adventure in search of a more colorful world.</p>
<p>A documentary that covers the work of Soviet film crews in Africa, from 1960 to 1990, identifying and undermining their perspective, or their bluff, when it comes to the recurring themes and motifs of propaganda associated with this continent.</p>
<p>An Azorean spaghetti western in which two outlaws, as tradition dictates, clash in a cemetery over a fistful of gold coins.</p>
<p>A loose adaptation of the eponymous book by Didier Eribon, Jean-Gabriel Périot draws on archival wealth to tell a story — collective and intimate, political and personal — of the French working class since the 1950s. The testimonies of workers, men and women, shape a story that is not always at your fingertips.</p>
<p>Director Alain Gomis delves into the archives to show us a visit by Thelonious Monk, the American jazz composer and pianist known for his style of improvisation, to Paris in 1969. The starting point is a raw interview that Monk gives to French television and the clash with the stereotypes he encounters. The result is a candid, improvised mosaic portrait of the jazz master.</p>
<p>We are in the Italian coastal resort of Rimini, it’s winter and tourists are here because they managed to book a cheap room. Cheering up the ranks of female senior fans is Ritchie Bravo, a past-his-prime lounge singer with an alcohol problem. Everything goes downhill when his mother dies, his dementia-suffering father is alone, and Ritchie’s grown-up daughter demands a sum of money to make up for his abandonment.</p>
<p>Milk pouring into open eyes, details of stones and roof tiles, or even dogs being petted. Francisco Queimadela and Mariana Caló invent an idiosyncratic yet hypnotic world.</p>
<p>A first feature film that engages in a process of knowledge sharing between two women with different occupations — sex work and cinematographic work — that try to start a dialogue, while both filming and allowing themselves to be filmed.</p>
<p>A semi-autobiographical work by Václav Kadrnka and the third film in his trilogy about the “Absence of a Loved One”. The narrative involves a family whose father suffers a cardiovascular accident and is left in a coma, in a limbo between life and death. Mother and son try to find a way, against the doctors’ lack of hope, to bring him back to life.</p>
<p>Rose, a professional dog walker, has recently occupied a vacant house which she now calls home - the realization of a dream. While claiming to take care of the property until the return of the landlady, the new "tenant" creates intimacy with the house and develops a fascination for the absent woman.</p>
<p>A deep zoom shot that plays with the definitions of sexe (sex or sexual organ) and thym (thyme), which rhymes with the English word time, creating a game with words and images.</p>
<p>With Dario Argento as executive producer, this film brings together actors such as Rupert Everett and Malcolm McDowell, with Alice Krige in the lead role. Veronica Ghent leaves for an atmospheric Scotland to recover from a double mastectomy. A film about revenge, but with a dose of nasty humor. Are scars evidence of past trauma or indicative of its subsequent healing?</p>
<p>In Natal, the Northeast of Brazil, the country is preparing to launch its first manned spaceship into space.<br /> A couple lives with their two children near the space center, the husband is a mechanic while the wife is a cleaning lady, who dreams of other horizons.</p>
<p>In a reference to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, an erotic movement is created between pre-existing and filmed images, with an amorous language, a dialectic of nakedness, heavy breathing and surrender of the body.</p>
<p>The director does what she wants with her vagina in Solitary Acts #4.</p>
<p>In the British countryside, director Toby Bull observes the sheep that live on the land where his parents were buried several years ago. Talking to his brother on the phone, they start a conversation about the means of communication between the animal kingdom, that of the living and that of the dead. An original perspective on bereavement, tackled with humour and tenderness.</p>
<p>Three girls from Vienna try to balance a fine line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. Two of them are fascinated by something that is foreign to them. One is torn between the culture practiced at home and the one practiced in the rest of her world. Adding to this explosive mix a viral video and an encounter with two overly patriotic young men, things cannot but start to go sideways. But isn’t youth the time to test the limits?</p>
<p>The avant-garde duo Telectu, composed of Vítor Rua and Jorge Lima Barreto, is accompanied in their life on the road, on trips around the world, throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The architecture of the documentary is the result of the curatorship of a vast archive of images, from which the current Telectu, Rua and Ilda Teresa Castro, created its operatic structure.</p>
<p>He manages to produce the most beautiful sounds with his rough guitar. She is the queen. When she saw his face, she drove him out of town. With his instrument broken, he finds shelter in the nearest forest. And with the help of some new friends, he’ll be playing a new tune again.</p>
<p>Arnaud, the director’s brother, has always been tempestuous. The adults looked at him as if he was always screwing up and he ended up proving them right, embracing the expectation. For this film, it all started when Arnaud went to a closed educational center and Laure to the Institut Supérieur des Arts. She has been filming her brother ever since. Fifteen years and many difficult moments later, here is a film about, by and with Arnaud.</p>
<p>A film that starts by quoting something that every parent, in the history of the world, will have said or thought: it’s all fun and games, until someone loses an eye.</p>
<p>A day like any other, until the moment when a mother has to take her offspring and lead them to a safe harbor. The unthinkable has happened: the house is flooding.</p>
<p>Franc is awaiting this moment with unyielding enthusiasm. The table has been set neatly, the steak has been marinating and the skillet is ready to turn it into a delicacy. The occasion is Liza’s birthday. A small delay reduces everything to ashes.</p>
<p>A seedy and hilarious slice of film history starring Jim Jarmusch, Mick Jagger, and IFFR’s very own Hubert Bals in puppet form. From the days when forbidden films were locked away in cans, and occasionally became subject to their own complex heist plots.</p>
<p>In 2035, auditors don’t just want to see your receipts for hidden expenses, they want to see your dreams. One such inspector, James (co-director Kentucker Audley), arrives at the house of Bella, an older woman, and finds himself falling in love with the younger version he encounters in her dreams. Meanwhile, a business conglomerate tries to populate her reveries with ads for fried chicken. Whimsical and unique, the film uses a story of blossoming love to depict the priceless sanctuary of imagination.</p>
<p>Inhabiting the blurred boundaries between documentary and fiction, this is a film that experiments with form — between curiosities, video clips and confessions — which is not surprising since it started out as a spectacle for the stage and not for the screen. Madeira’s autochthonous lusciouness is where the possibilities open up to think about everything we consider to be “natural” and whether we should expand the notion to encompass much more complexity.</p>
<p>Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, a young boy will also say goodbye to his family and the house where they live.</p>
<p>Mimi Minus is filmed in the middle of the masturbatory act, while the camera moves away until her body blends with the landscape.</p>
<p>With the potential to strike fear into the hearts of the toughest, this experimental film creates a collage of horror films to tell a story where “suspense” and “shock” are the keywords.</p>
<p>A meditation on the magic and danger of taking a bath.</p>
<p>A utopia of consumerism in which we are reduced to our tastes and characteristics so that we are better sold what we (don’t?) want.</p>
<p>Those who rebel against authority figures disobey. This film echoes “Cordobazo” — a popular rebellion in Cordoba against the Argentine military dictatorship in 1969 — through the story of Alicia, a trolleybus driver who joins an insurrection against an oppressive regime.</p>
<p>If you’re a bird, you can’t miss the most important competition for flying beings there is. But the teams won’t play fair and it will take a lot of care to figure out who the real winner is.</p>
<p>A tender film in which Liliana and Giovanni are engaged and, at the moment when everything should fall into place, fate intervenes. He accepts a job far from Milan, in Sicily, to try to make a better life for the two of them. But separation erodes the relationship.</p>
<p>In the countryside, the days were always the same, which led Súóng to go to Saigon, the city full of people and infinite possibilities. But when she gets a job at a small eatery, with two other girls — who also live there, together — she gets into a passive routine. Nothing seems to exist outside of the restaurant. But her inner life isn’t so carefree and there is a battle inside her that she will have to resolve.</p>
<p>Expanding on the hybrid narrative of his remarkable 2016 film Dark Skull, Kiro Russo has mounted a monumental, gently mystical portrait of the contemporary central South American cityscape and those who work within its bowels and environs. Set in the alternately harsh and beautiful terrain of La Paz, Bolivia and its surrounding rural areas, El Gran Movimiento follows a young miner as he looks for work alongside his friends, even as he begins to descend into a mysterious sickness. With its marvelous long-lens zoom work and increasingly dynamic, rhythmic editing, Russo’s film is a hypnotic journey into a psychological space that touches upon the supernatural. An NYFF59 selection. A KimStim release.</p>
<p>The Soviet pioneer of documentary film presents turbulent episodes of the civil war that followed the Russian revolution of the early 20th century and includes images of historical figures such as Trotsky. This film was considered lost (or reused in other works by the director), but it is finally presented to the public, a century later, given the reconstruction work by the academic Nikolai Izvolov.</p>
<p>In true Charlie’s Angels style, the immoral three are half-sisters (separated at birth because they were given up for adoption) whose mission is to avenge their mother’s death — and, consequently, obtain the inheritance that she left them. The mother in question is Jane from Double Agent 73, although she is no longer played by Chesty Morgan.</p>
<p>Grandpa gives a kite to his grandchild, they play with it together. One day, the wind picks Grandpa up and takes him away.</p>
<p>A tiny pirate rows on his boat, and nothing can stop him, not even whales, rain or icebergs.</p>
<p>The Lost Record is a documentary but also an essay, a fantastic tale that brings together rock’n’roll and science fiction. Alexandra Cabral and Ian F Svenonius, former lead singer of The Make-up and Nation of Ulysses, offer this meditation on the power of objects that we think are important. What do we do when we find something that is lost and that fascinates us? Do we keep it to ourselves or do we give it to the world as well?</p>
<p>As hilarious as it is uncomfortable, this family’s murder ballad ocould have been a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.</p>
<p>Two little girls, vampire capes and a penchant for fun. This is how they play with the recurring and classic motifs of horror films, playing with gender identities and power dynamics.</p>
<p>The second part of a portrait of the director as a young woman, built from autobiographical and metatextual brushstrokes, such as the inclusion of the family duo Honor Swinton Byrne and Tilda Swinton. After a tragic occurrence, Julie (Swinton Byrne) rechannels her heartbreak into her art, which has also been transformed into a personal fantasy as a graduation film. And as everything progresses, she grows.</p>
<p>Distant lights reveal the outline of a city. Illuminated ships cross the water with sleeping people on board and the night appears to become liquid.</p> <p>The sower of stars wakes them and travels with them through the city. They talk about this and that – and say goodbye to everything.</p>
<p>A celestial choreography that tells us about the absolute liberation of references and narrative. Against a starry sky, figures (students at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School in New York) show us the inner universe one enters when one falls asleep.</p>
<p>A father and two sons live in a remote house with a goat named Rosie. The kids learn to shoot, to mend fences. Until a neighbor from the village arrives and convinces the father to participate in a hunt for a witch, who has been killing the animals. The kids are left alone, with their imagination.</p>
<p>The body of a woman dancing, machinery at work and the sensuality of the increasingly abstract shapes on the screen.</p>
<p>A bustling urban habitat becomes an enchanting web of human connection.</p>
<p>Several dates arranged through dating apps, in Buenos Aires, turned into an animated comics. Several women in search of tenderness, love and sex—with varying degrees of success, but always with humour.</p>
<p>News arrives from the doctor regarding a back ache and Celeste’s mundane and lonely life is shaken.</p>
<p>The triforium is an interior, but usually open, gallery leading into the nave of a church. In this film, we walk, accompanied by the music of Laurence Crane, through the triforium of London’s Westminster Abbey, which has been hidden from human sight for 700 years.</p>
<p>Another time is possible! At least that is the case in the early days of industrial clockmaking in Switzerland in around 1877, when the disparity between the authorities, manufacturers and models gives rise to parallel temporal dimensions, each with their own timetable, values and ideology. In this proto-Taylorist society, where dignitaries and their gendarmes control the exact time and dictate the rhythms of production and community, a group of workers form an anarchist union in association with the First International federation of workers’ groups. This is where Josephine, who is in charge of assembling the movement, the heart of the mechanical watch, meets the Russian cartographer Pyotr Kropotkin, who is currently in the Jura valleys. Inspired by anarchist ideas, they demand the liberation of time and counter the values of the marketplace and nationalism with solidarity and pacifism.<br /> After his debut THOSE WHO ARE FINE, Schäublin continues to refine his style, which combines meticulous composition – both in his characteristic wide shots as well as in the extreme close-ups celebrating manual labour – with a distinct political stance that uses distancing and humour to enhance the topicality and universality of the story.</p>
<p>Even in silence, the moon exudes light. Or perhaps especially in silence, which may be one of the reasons Daniela Zahlner’s magical film <strong>Upwards Tide</strong> begins its flow without a sound. It makes sense to get used to the bright spot of light, which is interspersed throughout the film, in something akin to its native environment – darkness and quiet – while the handheld analog camera is the only thing moving. Then we can dance with it better ourselves once the moon begins to bounce up and down, multiplied and superimposed, a ball of light and night punching delicate holes and entrances into worlds.</p> <p><br /> But, already in the next shot, we discover that the human body makes for a fine moonscape too, while a green-tinged belly, not unlike that of a creature just landed from the waters, rises like the tide with every breath. This is where water, wind, and sing-song voices begin to flow into the image as the filmmaker blends the lines between human and non-human with an insightful touch and ear. Soon we get our first glimpse of extraordinary figures recognizable as human by their shapes, but filled with images of the Scottish Highlands from within – nature and humanity inextricably knit together.</p> <p><br /> These bodies become one with the landscape through an action on the part of the filmmaker: superimposing images, peeling the world into layers, revealing the invisible and the imaginable as well as the unimaginable. So it is that shins and necks can now be made up of moss and lichen, as stones and brooks flow through legs and arms. A particularly beautiful image brings together a close-up of a face, one eye gently closed, with a purple slope of heather. What else could a body be if we gave it a chance, the time? Also, do places live in us or do we live in them? The film invites these questions and many more, as it explores surfaces and memories, skin and form, color and metamorphosis, using time and film material as its tools, all under the moon as its guiding light. Yes, there is a tide in Daniela Zahlner’s film, the strongest one imaginable: It is the tide of being <em>with</em>, and never without. <em>(Ivana Miloš)</em></p>
<p>Ursa is a little polar bear that has to brave the Arctic to find his mother. Between the cold and the snow, towards the northern lights, he will encounter different challenges and different animals before reaching his destination.</p>
<p>A tiger, escaping his hunter, ends up in a space station occupied by an astronaut and his goldfish...</p>
<p>The strange sexualization of a singing dog in a children’s film, in a film investigation set to a song by Colette Renard.</p>
<p>A group of Indigenous Achuar children that moves self-determined through the endless green. Along the course of the Pastaza River, on the border between Ecuador and Peru, they catch fish, hunt and cook, play with lianas and watch videos on their smartphones. Director Inês T. Alves respectfully follows the everyday life of this young collective living in deep connection with one another and with the environment.</p>
<p>When you’re a student and you live far from your parents, friends are family. Friends study together, eat together, share everything and have no secrets, almost believing it will always be that way. But life has other plans, and the University of Bangui, in the Central African Republic, is just a synecdoche for a weary country.</p>
<p>The quiet lives of three ageing brothers, the last inhabitants of a once vibrant Spanish village, are about to change thanks to the construction of a new motorway.</p> <p>The Guallar brothers are the only inhabitants left in the crumbling village of Escó, in Northern Spain. In 1959, the village was expropriated under Franco's regime and the residents were forced to leave. The Guallar family refused, and now, with their parents long gone, the three ageing brothers live alone in the same family house, grazing their sheep among the ruins.<br /> <br /> Through stunning cinematography and sensitive interactions, we join the brothers as their quiet lives are about to radically change. A motorway construction begins that will cut directly through their village. After a lifetime in isolation, where will they go next?</p>
<p>An experienced Somali policewoman once again accompanies a young inmate through the procedures of the Somali justice system.</p>
<p>A wolf is wandering through the woods, trying to find a peaceful spot to practise his secret hobby.</p>
<p>We go down to Vale do Ave to learn about the stories of its women — especially that of the director’s grandmother — and their connection to the textile factories, before the end of the Portuguese dictatorship.</p>
<p>This is not a summer camp like the others. Here, there’s a special mission: all kids have lost someone in their lives and are here to help one another. Slowly, but surely.</p>
<p>An installation with different facets: two friends in a masturbation exercise in which they both lose and the collection of images that could explain their apparent impotence.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>