Playlist
<p>A damaged film shot in 1982 in a Latin American country documents the violence that took place on 9 May that year. Beneath its apparent banality, the film raises suspicions of manipulation of the truth.</p>
<p>“One of the people who appeared at the end of the film The Urgency of Death visits the house where she lived as a child and talks about the things that destroyed her father” (Lucia Seles). If Seles creates unforgettable characters and situations, all of which are imbued with a touching innocence, this film, which adopts a documentary structure, opens up a reflection on family bonds. Using an obsessive yet playful language that creates temporal and emotional abysses, this touching documentary about a father (and a sister) features an exciting and emerging new grammar.</p>
<p>A documentary filmmaker and his 12-year-old son stay in an abandoned hotel in Lisbon, which is empty like the one in The Shining. The boy is haunted by stories of monsters and ghosts. But during their stay, other ghosts emerge: those of the first Portuguese serial killer, and of men who suddenly go berserk and abandon their families. Starring Ana Moreira, Daniel Blaufuks and Manuel Mozos, the film is a deep reflection on cinema and what it means to be a spectator, exploring the way knowledge is passed on—from father to son, from one culture to another, and through the archives.</p>
<p>This meditative exploration of vision – both literal and metaphorical – finds symbolic ways to convey the traumatic loss of Shannon Liang’s then-partner. The film opens with unflinching footage of Liang’s own laser eye surgery, which leaves her with a persistent ‘halo’ distortion in her left eye. In this sensitive short film about the transformative power of grief, the ‘halo’ becomes both a symbol of impaired vision and an enigmatic marker of loss, subtly shifting the way we perceive the world around us.</p>
<p>Afterlives delves into the historical traces of extremist propaganda and the efforts of those resisting its violent impact. The film explores how to confront the violence encoded in this media, reaching beyond its toxic effects to engage with power structures spanning from the colonial past to the digital age. Moving between virtual and physical environments, it introduces us to an artist, an activist and a researcher. Each of these individuals use the legacy of violent extremism to create new images and narratives that offer new possibilities for the future.</p>
<p>Mértola, the Guadiana River, a place with old water mills where flour for bread was ground. A place where birds live and people relax. Fishing boats pass by and fish jump. The tides rise and fall, and the atmosphere changes every day. The colour of the water and the landscape varies throughout the year. At the same time, Manuela Barros Ferreira leaves us with the text Alma [soul]. Why do we contemplate the river?</p>
<p>Based on a skin-deep montage of personal archives, this intimate and political evocation of a life uprooted from its roots is coupled with a painful evocation of Crimea, the homeland lost since the Russian invasion.</p>
<p>From the disordered-saying(s) of a lifetime, to the material tracings of an unstructured narrative, 'All said done' is less a portrait of a person than an incomplete image of class relations and affective labor. This film is dedicated to the memory of my father, the one who laughed, 'kill'. —Micah Weber</p>
<p>Let's take a dark room. Celeste Rojas Mugica and her father Lucho lock themselves in it to develop images of the past. This past is Chile during the Pinochet years. Lucho Rojas was a photographer there but also an opponent of the regime, and therefore clandestine. His life oscillated between taking photos of the present and making himself invisible – between light and shadow. "The exercise consisted of, and still consists of: closing your eyes and imagining a place": the method and discipline of the clandestine. This sentence, the first in the dialogue between father and daughter that constitutes the framework of Une sombra oscilante , also formulates the theoretical hypothesis of the film: considering the image not from the point of view of the visible object, but from the faculty of imagination. In this singular dark room, development is no longer a solitary technical operation of revelation, but a poetic and political process of imagination for two. Developing the image means describing it not to exhaust its meaning but to flush out its parts of shadow, uncertainty, and therefore power. It is to extend it through words to imagine the story of the past, or to do it in one's head, with one's eyes closed, to project a future. The game is serious, but also very joyful: plastic inventions and ideas follow one another at an astonishing speed, all punctuated by an editing that combines freedom and rigor as rarely before. Brilliant and seductive, Una sombra oscilante profoundly renews the filmic approach to the photographic archive by inventing a cinematographic form that seems to be born from the very process of creating images – taking, developing. A dark chamber music, with four hands and two voices, draws the spectator into a captivating oscillation between the possible and the real, between what has been and what could have been, what is and what could be. In our dark times, here is a film that projects a light that is all the more joyful as it is intermittent – it does not forget the shadow from which it comes.</p>
<p>One sunny afternoon in Lisbon, Manel leaves home in search of work. He comes across an old church and is reminded of his late friend, Pedro. The history of this place becomes entwined with Manel’s emotional journey.</p>
<p>This revealing documentary offers unprecedented access to the private world of comedy's most enigmatic provocateur, Andy Kaufman, through a treasure trove of never-before-heard audio recordings. Created during the height of his fame, these audio diaries serve as personal journals, capturing Kaufman's inner thoughts, performance ideas and reflections on his unfinished semi-autobiographical book, "The Huey Williams Story." While Kaufman never completed this surrealist work before his untimely death, director Clay Tweel brings these pages to life with imaginative marionette puppetry, creating a mesmerizing glimpse into Kaufman's creative process.</p>
<p>A director revisits the diaries of Angela, a fellow film-lover and companion, many years later.</p>
<p>Notes of journey life of Stan Brakhage like a befits of a diary book in a very strong sense of experimentation, romantic, modernist and abstract.</p>
<p>Rafa leaves home to run an errand for his father: to buy wine for lunch. Annoyed, he wanders from store to store, which leads him into unexpected situations. Based on the main story, the film reveals others: Nelson convinces Txidy to cut his hair in exchange for help; Jamir looks for Tofinha in the gardens by the river Tagus; and Sony wanders through Penajóia looking for words for his poem Ali [There]. An adventure through the various neighbourhoods of Monte da Caparica, Aqui, Ali is a version of a territory and a history as remembered by its inhabitants.</p>
<p>From 1970 onwards, and for two and a half years, the Revolutionary Brigades devoted themselves to armed struggle against the Portuguese dictatorial regime, as part of the fight against capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. They carried out dozens of actions, most of which were related to the colonial war, and were the only armed struggle organisation still active on April 25, 1974. This documentary evokes the period from the establishment of the dictatorship in Portugal (1926) to the emergence of the Brigades, and then traces the unique history of this anti-fascist organisation and its actors.</p>
<p>In the wake of a dream, João Vieira Torres sets off to find the children that his grandmother Aurora, a midwife, helped deliver. Through encounters with the living and the dead, he uncovers tragic destinies which reflect a structural history of violence against women. A curse dispelled by the means of cinema, resulting in a film of exceptionally rare beauty.</p>
<p>Melville’s short story is the starting point. “I would prefer not to,” Bartleby’s notorious line, runs like a common thread through the essayistic montage. It connects sequences from Straub and Huillet’s History Lessons (1972) with dialogue between Benedikt Zulauf, who appeared in the Brecht adaptation, and the filmmaker. The making of B for Bartleby fulfils a long-held wish of her late partner, who was terminally ill at the time of production. As ‘essay’ means roughly ‘rehearsal’ in Spanish, B for Bartleby is a reflection on retelling and appropriation of literary material.</p>
<p>The writer María Luisa Elío returned to Spain in 1970 after three decades of exile in Mexico. She wanted to reconnect with a past that perhaps no longer existed. Through 10 short stories, the director explores fragments of the life of this woman who was part of the most important avant-garde artistic movements of the mid-20th century and who wrote, acted in, and filmed "On the Empty Balcony," a film about her own wounds.</p>
<p>The road, the house, the key, the animals, Bamssi. Images as urgent as an Instagram story create a dialogue within the family across the sea: Mourad and Fairuz, Tunisia and abroad. Time passes both slowly and quickly.</p>
<p>How do you make a portrait of a music group when nobody knows who the members are? Marie Losier takes up the task and travels to San Francisco to create a documentary on cult band The Residents. There, we meet Homer Flynn, president of The Cryptic Corporation, who guides us through The Residents’ archive, sharing a variety of anecdotes related to the objects it contains. Complementing his stories with archival footage and a historical context, Losier delivers a compassionate portrait and a celebration of creativity.</p>
<p>“In the spring of 2025, the National Centre for Visual Arts and Lieux Fictifs invited me to make a film with inmates at the Baumettes Prison (Marseille). I set out with no preconceptions and with two references: To Sang Fotostudio, a film by Johan van der Keuken, and the book La Chambre claire by Roland Barthes” (Hassen Ferhani, June 2025). A photo studio shelters, liberates and clarifies the dreams and the bodies of men.</p>
<p>Faced with a society mired in conservatism, a charismatic and controversial young singer from Michigan is transformed into a pop icon before our very eyes. Through the prism of her personal life and the challenges she overcame during her rise to fame between 1978 and 1992, Becoming Madonna chronicles the extraordinary success of this living legend.</p>
<p>Black Journal was the first nationally broadcast African-American television series in the United States. Greaves co-hosted with Lou House (aka Wali Sadiq). The series explored the many aspects of historic and contemporary African-American life that had been, and continued to be, ignored or suppressed by American commercial television. These two episodes give an idea of what the breakthrough show was like.</p>
<p>Black Journal was the first nationally broadcast African-American television series in the United States. Greaves co-hosted with Lou House (aka Wali Sadiq). The series explored the many aspects of historic and contemporary African-American life that had been, and continued to be, ignored or suppressed by American commercial television. These two episodes give an idea of what the breakthrough show was like.</p>
<p>Produced for NASA, with the cooperation of its Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, Space for Women shows the variety of ways in which women were contributing to the American space programme. The film is narrated by Ricardo Montalban, but for the most part gives voice to a wide variety of women, including a research psychologist, an AV specialist and a mathematician. In Black Power in America, Greaves and writer Lou Porter struggle to come to terms with the racial complexity of black America in the 1980s.</p>
<p>Profile of a Problem Drinker is aimed at drinkers, family members and work colleagues who struggle to live with the difficulties alcohol addiction creates. Blood and Fire focuses on the Canadian Salvation Army’s devotion to improving the everyday spiritual lives of men, on the street and in jail, who are down on their luck. Stigma is about a young woman who has recovered from a mental breakdown, but around whom family and friends now feel uncomfortable.</p>
<p>A poignant documentary exploring the extraordinary bond between director Pippo Delbono and Bobò—Vincenzo Cannavacciuolo—a deaf-mute, illiterate man with microcephaly who lived for over four decades in the Aversa asylum. Delbono discovered Bobò in 1995 and brought him into his theater and film world, capturing archival footage and new material that reveal Bobò’s profound poetic presence and transformative impact on Delbono’s artistic vision</p>
<p>Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.</p>
<p>With humor, heart and a lot of glitz and glam, Boy George & Culture Club is an endlessly charming documentary that dives headfirst into the chaos, charisma and enduring bond of one of the most iconic bands of the ‘80s. Straight from the mouths of its four legendary members, Boy George & Culture Club is a love story about the undeniable fondness that flowed beneath the surface of these musical legends — and the drama and heartbreak in between.</p>
<p>Leni and Mandemba are two fishermen from the island of Bubaque, in Guinea-Bissau. The filmmaker follows them for a whole day as they prepare their tools, gather bait and go fishing. A filmmaker and two fishermen who shape and form a landscape and a choreography of gestures on an afternoon of fishing.</p>
<p>An observation of post-colonial economic relations through the intersecting trajectories of two Filipino women: one preparing to leave her native island to work as a domestic in Europe, the other to return for good.</p>
<p>Renowned director and choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou and his team are preparing Transverse Orientation. Inspired by the myth of the Minotaur, the performance uses light as a guide, transcending linear narrative structures and questioning hierarchies, identity and communication. Since its premiere in 2021, the production has travelled across three continents, twenty countries and thirty-one cities. The film focuses on a central question, “Why do we do what we do?”, highlighting art as an act of resistance against the fleeting nature of life and as a means of giving it meaning.</p>
<p>Aida, a 33-year-old struggling actress from a provincial background finds herself homeless on the streets of Cairo, alongside her reclusive neighbour Samiha, a 70-year-old bourgeois woman. With no money and nowhere to go, the two women, aided by Yassin, a 20-year-old street-savvy youth, set out to find shelter. Amid the banal—and, at times, disastrous—turns their journey takes, they embark on parallel journeys of self-discovery. An extraordinary friendship grows between the unlikely trio, like a delicate flower blooming from a thorny cactus.</p>
<p>Frances Hubbard Flaherty was the person who made all her husbands’ major films, from Nanook of the North to Louisiana Story, happen. Their three daughters, Barbara, Franny and Monica, as well as Robert’s brother David and others, all played crucial parts in ensuring that his films were completed. Sami van Ingen, a great-grandson of Flaherty, uses previously unseen archival material to share his own family stories. This deeply researched and emotional film, reminiscent of a 19th century family novel, opens up the historical landscape of people sidelined by history.</p>
<p>Cinema Kawakeb follows a filmmaker’s struggle to document the fading existence of a crumbling cinema in Amman, Jordan. Through the stories of its last two employees and its only loyal patron, a homeless scrap collector who lives for classic Indian films, the film becomes a meditation on loss, memory and conflict. As the theatre nears demolition, the film delves into the roots of its demise, tracing tensions from a family feud to regional and global power struggles.</p>
<p>“An attempt to reconstruct the house of my grandparents, the only tangible place where my memories still reside and the djinn (ghost) of my grandfather remains. The film explores the empty spaces with only traces of the past life left behind.” Luca Trouwborst</p>
<p>1901. The adventurer Lumière Brothers’ camera operator, Gabriel Veyre, disembarks in the Land of Nour on a three-month contract. He was to introduce the venerable Sultan to the mysteries of the camera obscura and the cinematograph. He would remain there for 30 years. This is a phantasmagorical, humorous and almost frightening, yet scientific, reverie about the first inventors of cinema.</p>
<p>Orphan of the country where he was born, orphan of the Portuguese state. Imprisoned for half his life, never free. Bruno is ‘Ghoya’, a Cape Verdean Creole rapper and political activist. This film is a crossroads in a moment of struggle and life.</p>
<p>A filmmaker follows the odyssey of an invisible missionary as he wanders between villages in Guinea-Bissau, trying to respond to the call by Amílcar Cabral, who wishes to hear the voice emanating from the heart of his people, and witnessing the country’s chaotic operational impasse, which is ultimately overcome by the people’s determination to succeed through hard work.</p>
<p>After dreaming of her father’s death, a young woman begins to imagine and inhabit the turbulent landscapes of his dreams and memories, uncovering fears that mirror her own.</p>
<p>An investigative documentary that follows journalist Seymour Hersh as he uncovers and exposes significant politically sensitive stories—continuing Poitras’s acclaimed engagement with high‑stakes investigative journalism and governmental power.</p>
<p>A heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful, account of the epilepsy of Louis Petit as documented by his parents, filmmakers Christopher Petit and Emma Matthews. Alongside the struggle within Britain’s ailing national health care system, a far-reaching essay-collage on technology, capitalism and the human mind.</p>
<p>On a ferry in Greece, Pina and Ola set sail on a holiday destined for adventure. When their bond is tested by their ‘daddy complex’, everything is at stake, and the sisters must fight their way through an impossible question: should they forgive him?</p>
<p>Do You Love Me is a playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. It is a love letter to Beirut, spanning 70 years of film, TV, home videos and photography, exploring the Lebanese collective psyche—marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers and artists, the film pieces together a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, celebrating creative expression as a form of resistance and renewal, and as a means of preserving memory.</p>
<p>“This is not your normal concert…”, as David Lynch says in the beginning. It is more of a cinematic journey during Duran Duran’s historic performance at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles. The show featured guests such as Beth Ditto, Mark Ronson, Gerard Way and Kelis. Lynch made this film purely for pleasure and as a love letter to Duran Duran. Isn’t it a special treat to experience the concert of his favourite band as captured by his camera? It’s also another way to bid farewell to the artist who changed cinema.</p>
<p>Set in a confined world outside time, East of Noon is the fable of prodigy ABDO (19) who uses music to rebel against his elders: showman SHAWKY (70), an eccentric showman who rules with a mix of performance and fear, and storyteller JALALA (75), who provides relief with stories of the Sea, which no one else has seen. East of Noon is a satire on the inner workings of an ailing autocracy and its inherent vulnerability to youth’s unchained vision of a better world.</p>
<p>“Earlier I walked past the Mole Antonelliana, perhaps the most brilliant work of architecture ever built — strangely, it has no name — as a result of an absolute drive into the heights — it recalls nothing so much as my Zarathustra. I baptized it Ecce homo and in that spirit placed an enormous free space around it” (Nietzsche, 1888). Ecce Mole contrasts two buildings designed by Italian architect Alessandro Antonelli in Turin. It is a concise and mysterious study of opposites: public and private, interior and exterior, up and down, reality and cinema, Heaven and Hell.</p>
<p>A Serbian jazz musician reclaims his childhood home after decades in Germany. His return sparks reunions and revelations, blending humor and nostalgia in a unique exploration of post-socialist life and personal history.</p>
<p>Putting It Straight, the first film Greaves directed and edited for the NFB, focuses on a woman who notices that a local child, whose teeth are crooked, is being teased by other children. Smoke and Weather, the first film Greaves wrote, directed and edited, is about forest fires. Emergency Ward is an early landmark in cinéma vérité filmmaking—Greaves explores an emergency ward in Montreal, and speaks with doctors and nurses who minister to those who find their way to emergency care.</p>
<p>Masao Adachi distills six decades as a filmmaker and revolutionary into this biopic of a Japanese outlaw, combining archival material, restagings, and fantasy for a story of terror and resistance.</p>
<p>Lost in her fears and fantasies, a young woman writes in a notebook. A young man finds this notebook on a train. Suddenly, they find themselves in the heart of a forest, in a nocturnal reality where dreams come to life.</p>
<p>Many people died in the village of Ziglo, in western Côte d’Ivoire, during the 2011 civil war. Having waited too long for state justice, a native woman who had lost several members of her family decided to take the village’s destiny into her own hands by creating a space for women to speak out.</p>
<p>All the clocks at my grandparents’ house have stopped.</p>
<p>Most people know little about Frederick Douglass beyond the fact that he was a major force in the abolition of slavery and an important voice in the struggle for voting rights for both African-Americans and women. Produced by the American National Park Service, this enacted docudrama provides a wealth of information about the life and career of Douglass. Less known is Ida B. Wells, a pioneering investigative journalist and educator who worked in the Deep South, and was one of the founders of the NAACP. Ida B. Wells, also produced for the National Park Service, is narrated by Toni Morrison.</p>
<p>When the United States Information Agency wanted a news item about a major arts festival in Dakar, Senegal, Greaves was provided with minimal funding and equipment and a single cameraman. They trained their chauffeur to take sound and produced The First World Festival of Negro Arts, a poetic survey of the festival, featuring poet Langston Hughes. Produced for the United States Information Agency, Wealth of a Nation is Greaves’ personal paean to the fundamental importance of individual self-expression. From These Roots tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance in photographs.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, believing she was doomed, Irma took a trip to Greece. Today, she retraces that journey, accompanied by three young men. From island to island, between sky and sea, the travelers read, listen and live, carried by a longing for beauty and clarity.</p>
<p>Follows a mysterious herd of ghost elephants in the jungles of Angola.</p>
<p>Gil, aged 50, has always wanted to be a singer. She moved to São Paulo with her wife at the age of 20 in order to fulfil that dream. She has worked as a cleaner ever since. Maria Clara proposes making a film about her. Gil becomes famous, and they blow up two cities and reflect on dreams, work and oblivion.</p>
<p>Life should be our first object of inquiry and care. The reason for this is clear: we are living beings in a situation in which the conditions of life are under threat. Death has no place in this ecological discourse. While the difficulty of acknowledging death is nothing new, in our contemporary situation, death has a new face. Ouro e Cinza goes beyond representation, becoming an intimate act of excavation that proposes to materially, politically and metaphysically mediate the re-appropriation of death as power and our sovereignty as mortal beings both in the private and social spheres.</p>
<p>A family returns to the beach where the father drowned seven years ago. It is the first time they go to the seaside together since the tragedy. The filmmaker, the eldest son, records this moment, opening up conversations about ways of coping with loss.</p>
<p>Hair, Paper, Water... is an intimate correspondence film between two filmmakers, Nicolas Graux in Belgium and Trương Minh Quý in Vietnam, made during the pandemic. They exchange letters in audiovisual form, exploring themes of isolation, identity, and memory. This poetic dialogue moves between personal landscapes, distant homes, and the temporal suspension brought about by confinement.</p>
<p>The film brings together two individuals—an immigrant filmmaker from Belarus and a ten-year-old girl from a southern village in Kyrgyzstan. Through fragments of their lives, they discover invisible threads connecting their fears, hopes and longing for home.</p>
<p>Sérgio travels to a West Africa metropolis to work for an NGO as an environmental engineer on a road project between the desert and the jungle. There, he becomes entangled in an intimate yet unbalanced relationship with two city dwellers, Diara and Gui. As the neo-colonial dynamics within the expatriate community unravel, this fragile bond becomes his only refuge from an impending collapse into solitude or barbarism.</p>
<p>This is the story of Sagrario, a shellfish gatherer from the Ferrol coast, and her thousand faces. It presents us with an aloof mother, a family in perpetual turmoil and an adultery trial due to the daughter she has with her lover, a carpenter who is ‘worth loving’. While female desire was controlled and oppressed during the dictatorship, here it is presented through a delicate and critical portrayal of a classist society that could not stand Sagrario’s disobedience. This is the latest film by Margarita Ledo Andión, an important author from Galicia who has not yet been sufficiently seen in Portugal.</p>
<p>Most people know little about Frederick Douglass beyond the fact that he was a major force in the abolition of slavery and an important voice in the struggle for voting rights for both African-Americans and women. Produced by the American National Park Service, this enacted docudrama provides a wealth of information about the life and career of Douglass. Less known is Ida B. Wells, a pioneering investigative journalist and educator who worked in the Deep South, and was one of the founders of the NAACP. Ida B. Wells, also produced for the National Park Service, is narrated by Toni Morrison.</p>
<p>A young man travels from Lisbon to Sintra to visit his lover at her country house, unaware that her husband has just arrived from Paris. Forced to wait in the rain, André is tormented by his restless imagination.</p>
<p>Nico D’Alessandria’s graduation film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome features the director himself and is inspired by T. S. Eliot’s poem of the same name, which is recited in a voice-over by Carmelo Bene and set to the music of Luciano Berio.</p>
<p>Bulgarian queer artist and songwriter Ivo Dimchev transforms personal and social hardship into provocative public and intimate spectacles, boldly exploring sexuality, identity, faith, and activism in a celebration of queer visibility.</p>
<p>Greaves was interested in J. L. Moreno’s technique of psychodrama, which involves patients dramatising traumatic experiences in order to help them confront and overcome them. In the film In the Company of Men, a trained psychodramatist successfully works with groups of black workers and their white managers in a factory in the American Deep South. In The Deep North, the psychodrama method is used to explore racism in Greaves’ hometown of New York City.</p>
<p>Once a symbol of Yugoslavia’s progress, Sava Centar was left to deteriorate since the country broke apart. Piece by piece, the interior elements that resided in this cultural and congress centre since the 70’s are torn out.</p>
<p>Última Memória, a play by Sara Carinhas, premiered at Teatro São Luiz in March 2023. Estava Escuro na Barriga do Lobo is not its making of, but an incursion by Joana Botelho into Sara’s wandering doubts on her journey until the curtains open. In the special session at Doclisboa, the film director and the theatre director explore the encounter between the screen and the live body of the actress, in a dramaturgy that sees the film co-inhabit with short scenes from the show that the ordinary film audience does not see. This will be a unique and unrepeatable party to combat loneliness, as in life and as in the theatre.</p>
<p>Rising musician Jeff Buckley had only released one album when he died suddenly in 1997. Now, never-before-seen footage, exclusive voice messages, and accounts from those closest to him offer a portrait of the captivating singer.</p>
<p>Nationtime is the only substantive record of the first national African-American political convention, held in Gary, Indiana, in 1972. Greaves: “Nationtime was narrated by Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. It had Dick Gregory, Richard Hatcher, Jesse Jackson, Isaac Hayes, a whole array of black figures speaking militantly about the liberation of black America… I approached all the major networks, put 45,000 of my personal dollars into it, and Nationtime never saw the light of day.” Just Doin’ It is a cinéma vérité exploration of two very different barbershops in Atlanta, Georgia.</p>
<p>Mozambique. Benjamin tries to save money to organise his son’s birthday party. Filimone visits his family between war missions. Eulália has just given birth to her sixth child, but has to return to work at a landfill site. ‘Ku Handza’ is an expression in the Tsonga language that describes a chicken looking for food.</p>
<p>A woman and a man throw themselves into a sailing race lasting several days and nights on a large lake. One would like to cross over, yet one cannot, one misses any sign of life, yet life is perceivable in the rushing tide, in the blowing of the wind, in the drifting clouds, in the solitary cry of birds. One must delve deep into oneself and feel the heart-ripping that nature imposes.</p>
<p>Henri Laborit’s thoughts taken from Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard shooting Notre musique, a song by Fairuz: just some of the materials in this essay-tribute to the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich.</p>
<p>Following the end of World War II, Hollywood produced a series of ‘problem pictures’ that engaged crucial social issues. Lost Boundaries focuses on race—a light-skinned African American couple, unbeknownst to their two children, passes for white in a small New Hampshire town. When their son brings an African-American college friend (played by Greaves) home, the family’s lives are disrupted. Greaves’ first cameo in a Hollywood film convinced him that he could be of greater service to society as a documentary filmmaker; he soon moved to Montreal where he trained at the National Film Board of Canada.</p>
<p>A love journey along a side path. From her cabin to the ‘garden of little brambles’, the director engages in dialogue with the beings she encounters. Women, animals, flowers, trees, and books joyfully coexist in this quest.</p>
<p>A contemplative immersion in hybrid moments combining army practices, animal training and virtual reality creates a surreal mindset, as simulations steadily diverge from reality. How does constant mediation change our relationship with the visceral?</p>
<p>After the death of his beloved Marian, Romanian painter Murivale keeps his memory alive through hundreds of portraits of him. Just as Leonardo da Vinci did with his muse Salaì, Murivale honours his promise to Marian by walking home after an exhibition.</p>
<p>A behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis"</p>
<p>A renowned emblem of Portuguese interventionist theater, the Cornucópia tear appeared in fascist obscurity to combat the dictatorship on stage. Among the classics, a project is born and dies, but one face remains iconic: Luís Miguel Cintra, who shared his art with the permanent complicity of a filmmaker, Solveig Nordlund. Together, they organize their drawers, guided by images, traces and testimonies of the protagonists who survived this History.</p>
<p>Eva Giolo’s latest work takes us to Val Gardena, where people still speak Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language. Giolo subverts the usual representation of mountain communities to deliver a portrait of a precious cultural heritage in constant evolution. Here, the inhabitants preserve and nurture their culture for future generations with awareness of the world and creativity. Shot on 16mm film sensitive to the grandeur and fragility of nature, Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths is an exquisite essay on the vital importance of linguistic diversity.</p>
<p>During the late 1940s, Greaves appeared in several ‘race films’ (films made by blacks and whites for African-American audiences). “At the time, Miracle in Harlem was considered a prestigious film: the first independent black-cast film done to so-called Hollywood standards. Miracle was done with the support of the NAACP, who were very concerned with the image of black people at that time. I played the romantic lead in Miracle, which has a very confused plot. Stepin Fetchit was wonderful. When you saw him in the context of black society, you said, ‘Gee, this is one good actor!’” (William Greaves).</p>
<p>In 1968, Nadir, a Moroccan student at the film school in Łódź, Poland, has a love affair with his editing teacher, a Jewish anti-Zionist woman. A recovered letter carries the narrative into a meditation through time on the violence of history.</p>
<p>The first week of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. As routines dissolve and the existential threat renders inaction unbearable, three observations converge to form a narrative that conveys the collective experience of a nation determined to resist.</p>
<p>Two high-mountain guides trudge in the moraines of the Mer de glace, a famous glacier in the Mont Blanc massif. The images capture their dances with the void, the verticality and instability of the ground. The sound materializes this moving and unpredictable environment.</p>
<p>Nationtime is the only substantive record of the first national African-American political convention, held in Gary, Indiana, in 1972. Greaves: “Nationtime was narrated by Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. It had Dick Gregory, Richard Hatcher, Jesse Jackson, Isaac Hayes, a whole array of black figures speaking militantly about the liberation of black America… I approached all the major networks, put 45,000 of my personal dollars into it, and Nationtime never saw the light of day.” Just Doin’ It is a cinéma vérité exploration of two very different barbershops in Atlanta, Georgia.</p>
<p>“Disaster ruins everything while leaving everything as it is,wrote Maurice Blanchot. Everything.” - Ghassan Salhab. From the southern districts of Beirut to southern Lebanon, a car winds its way through the devastated country. No title for such desolation.</p>
<p>NOVA 78 resurrects the electrifying atmosphere of the Nova Convention of 1978 through restored, never-before-seen archival footage featuring icons like William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, and Patti Smith—reimagined as a vibrant cinematic event for contemporary audiences .</p>
<p>A decade after his death, one of the most significant and compelling filmmakers of the past century has one last trick up his sleeve: a trove of never-before-seen footage that he believed to be the most important he ever filmed. Genre-defying director William Greaves searches for the divine origins of his own creativity at a cocktail party he masterminded in 1972 for the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.</p>
<p>Depressive. Virginal. Anti-Bolsonaro. Cinephile. Religious. Porn-theorist. Centripetal. Vegetarian. Literature lover. Proto-suicidal. Indiscreet. That’s how the protagonist and co-director of this nocturnal poem describes himself. His place in Sergipe is the whole universe—it could be a Noah’s Ark with his most beloved ones: his mother, the animals, the plants, the books and the films. Between personal diary and a treatise about what it means to be human, the claustrophobia of fear and dreams that are bigger than reality, and the natural fluids and the abstraction of pixels, cinema is being born.</p>
<p>In 1929, the Ardnacruscha hydroelectric power station was inaugurated in County Clare, Ireland. Observing the interplay of water and concrete, this essay examines the majestic edifice by replacing it in the context of a burgeoning modern nation-state.</p>
<p>“One day, my mother died. It was a beautiful, cold day. I stayed with her for a while, then I left. I criss-crossed the roads, not knowing what I was looking for. Between sorrow and moments of lightness, I filmed familiar faces and those I met.” Alexandre Carré</p>
<p>ONE TO ONE, set in New York in 1972, explores John & Yoko’s musical, personal, artistic, social, and political world set against the backdrop of a turbulent era in American history. At the core of the film is the One to One Charity Concert for Special Needs Children, John Lennon’s only full length concert between the final Beatles concert in 1966 and his death. The film includes a wealth of previously unseen Lennon archives including personal phone calls, home movies filmed by John & Yoko, as well as restored and remastered footage from the One to One Concert with remixed audio overseen by Sean Ono Lennon.</p>
<p>Drifting through videoclips online can easily leave you distracted, lost and back at square one. Imagine finding a series of clips organised by a sense of inchoate feeling of eclipse of time and end of the world, evoking a shared sense of fate.</p>
<p>Two directors and a translator are editing archive footage from a collective film shot by young Israelis and French people in Israel and the West Bank in 2012. During filming, several guides attempted to shift the French participants perspective on the political situation—Shaï, Natally, Tsion and Aseel, the only Palestinian in the group. In the editing room in Paris, a mirror effect is taking place between the archive footage and the three people working on it.</p>
<p>Struggling with depression and social anxiety, Paul has found refuge in serving women who invite him to clean their homes. By sharing his gently eccentric routines on social media, he combats loneliness and takes it one day at a time.</p>
<p>Pele Nómada is a film about memory and its displacements in the present. In the centre of a gentrified Lisbon, whose past is lost among facades lacking personality, João Fiadeiro carries moving boxes into a van. He takes with him everything that has been built up over his lifetime and that of atelier RE.AL, which will be taken to Serralves, where it will be archived. Before delivering the material to its final destination, João decides to visit all the places where RE.AL had its headquarters. This movement is a kind of farewell and, at the same time, a re-encounter. How will the past be in the future?</p>
<p>In an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of Brussels, strangers come and go, while ghosts linger. Among the broken glass, a young streamer performs a live sex show for an on-line subscriber. Under the same dilapidated roof, an old woman lights a fire and drinks her sorrows away in the room where her husband stayed until he died. A chance encounter between these two lonely beings unleashes a flood of memories and virtual data. Real-life connections, however, are scarce, and mutual consolation seems like a distant dream.</p>
<p>Gerd Korske once again surveys the past and the state of affairs of East Germany. His protagonists, female employees of large factories in a country that no longer exist, are concerned with both labour power and women’s issues, such as the opportunities available to women in terms of employment, active participation in social life and self-realisation. Kroske creates an experimental setup with split screens and asks, “What was once gained, what is lost?” The film has an apt title, placed at the intersection of the work of directors Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, and writer Jane Austen.</p>
<p>Profile of a Problem Drinker is aimed at drinkers, family members and work colleagues who struggle to live with the difficulties alcohol addiction creates. Blood and Fire focuses on the Canadian Salvation Army’s devotion to improving the everyday spiritual lives of men, on the street and in jail, who are down on their luck. Stigma is about a young woman who has recovered from a mental breakdown, but around whom family and friends now feel uncomfortable.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, Orlando Jesus was more than just a boxer: he embodied the tough spirit of Lisbon with its neighbourhood gyms, intense nights and marginal figures that shaped a generation. An intimate and imperfect portrait, where the camera captures the gestures and voices that still resist, preserving a time in the process of disappearance, the presence of Orlando Jesus and the Lisbon that shaped him.</p>
<p>Putting It Straight, the first film Greaves directed and edited for the NFB, focuses on a woman who notices that a local child, whose teeth are crooked, is being teased by other children. Smoke and Weather, the first film Greaves wrote, directed and edited, is about forest fires. Emergency Ward is an early landmark in cinéma vérité filmmaking—Greaves explores an emergency ward in Montreal, and speaks with doctors and nurses who minister to those who find their way to emergency care.</p>
<p>When an old fan breaks down in a cluttered attic in Marseille, the sweltering heat forces a middle-aged Portuguese man and a young Cameroonian to work together to fix it, despite sharing no language.</p>
<p>This feature-length film is part of Greaves’ final major project, which included 12 video modules, a teaching guide and a website. The project explores and honours the many accomplishments of Bunche, a United Nations diplomat and chief drafter of the UN Charter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an armistice between Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in 1950. This documentary about Bunche, produced for PBS, was the last of a series of films that Greaves made to document the history of African-American contributions to American and world culture.</p>
<p>The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his life’s work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies. To what extent did his camera affect their relationship when Adrian was alive? To what extent does it define that relationship now that he is gone? Meanwhile, an effort to adapt McElwee’s first feature, Sherman’s March, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.</p>
<p>Howard Brookner’s thorough, compulsively watchable documentary follows theater artist Robert Wilson (who died in July at age 83) as he sets out to create an epic 12-hour opera, a collaboration between six international theater companies, for the 1984 Summer Olympics.</p>
<p>Howard Brookner’s rarely seen second documentary captures Robert Wilson’s visionary quest to unify six international theatre productions into a monumental global opera for the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. The film immerses us in Wilson’s creative universe and the result is an incandescent portrait of artistic genius, revealing Bob’s ambitious vision and the delicate realities behind creative dreams. After Brookner’s untimely death from AIDS in 1989, his films almost disappeared entirely. This restored documentary is a testament to Wilson’s artistic vision and monumental dreams.</p>
<p>Numerous ruins in contemporary Turkey are evidence of the Armenian history of Anatolia. Doğan seeks an Armenia turned into memory. A ruin emerges through natural decay or human intervention. But what becomes of the history of those who once built the structure?</p>
<p>Ninety per cent of what we consume is shipped to us by boat. Capital is concentrated and distributed in ports, where land meets the sea. Without ships, dreams dry up. Can those who are blind to the sea imagine a different world?</p>
<p>Chanasorn Chaikitiporn focuses on the origins of the idea of film archiving in Thailand by examining the work of Dome Sukvong, founder of the Thai Film Archive. This includes his essays, books, letters, memoirs and reports, which read by the archive staff. We uncover the oldest moving images in Thailand, from the Topical Film Service of the Royal State Railways—the national film production centre during the absolute monarchy era—, which inspired the creation of a national archive.</p>
<p>A pile of blankets filmed at bed height appears in a room with faded colors. Fragmented views follow one another, suggesting the fragile living conditions of people living in the rubble of a suburb. A prayer in Romanian signals their origin. A plane passes in the sky and we are transported to a parade of shimmering colors in the streets of Okinawa, before landing at a beekeeper's in Ariège. The Franco-Japanese artist Amie Barouh brings together in a form of filmed diary fragments of biography and snippets of conversations collected over the years and during her travels, mainly from Roma friends with whom she has lived. Through frenetic editing, Shuruuk , which literally means "rising in the east", weaves a dreamlike journey that follows the movement of the sun, from Japan to Tunisia, from Palestine to the four corners of France. The camera rummages through the folds of reality to capture the faces of those with whom the artist navigates, to bear witness to the struggle for their daily survival as well as more specific manifestations in the face of state oppression. Amie Barouh intertwines the impressionist bursts with bursts of another gravity: violent and sudden police interventions, which take shape in the movement of the film, carried by a manifest vital impulse. The fragmentation of Shuruuk reflects the perpetual reconfiguration to which the lives of all these beings are subjected, humans, animals, like these bees that swarm while the tender words of Pierre Barouh resonate: "Today I am what I am, we are who we are, and all that is the sum of the pollen we have fed on."</p>
<p>One of the pioneers of Belgian cinema, Émile Degelin, based this short film, which could be qualified as ‘filmed music’, on the electroacoustic composition for voice and tape Omaggio a Joyce, by Luciano Berio, which is an interpretation of the poem Sirens, from Ulysses. The dreamlike atmosphere of the film won its director the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 11th Berlinale.</p>
<p>A woman on her commute to work receives a call from her son. She tells him about her routine. Meanwhile, her husband, now retired, tries to fill a void.</p>
<p>Putting It Straight, the first film Greaves directed and edited for the NFB, focuses on a woman who notices that a local child, whose teeth are crooked, is being teased by other children. Smoke and Weather, the first film Greaves wrote, directed and edited, is about forest fires. Emergency Ward is an early landmark in cinéma vérité filmmaking—Greaves explores an emergency ward in Montreal, and speaks with doctors and nurses who minister to those who find their way to emergency care.</p>
<p>An eight-year-old girl is found dead, killed by her parents. The investigation reveals a life of abuse. The filmmaker reads Frédéric Boyer’s eponymous book dedicated to this true crime story. From the story of an infanticide unfolds a meditation on our relationship with evil.</p>
<p>Stela a 36-year-old woman, has advanced education but struggles to maintain employment.</p>
<p>“Powell Lindsay wrote the script of Souls of Sin, which is about two characters: Dollar Bill, a young black man in Harlem, trying desperately to get to the top of the world through crime, and Alabam, a country bumpkin who plays the guitar and ends up becoming a big star. I played Alabam. From the acting point of view, it was a nice challenge. That film played throughout the black film circuit, which was something like 1200 theaters at the time. When I first saw the finished film, I almost crawled underneath my chair! Seeing myself acting on the screen was a shock.” William Greaves</p>
<p>Produced for NASA, with the cooperation of its Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, Space for Women shows the variety of ways in which women were contributing to the American space programme. The film is narrated by Ricardo Montalban, but for the most part gives voice to a wide variety of women, including a research psychologist, an AV specialist and a mathematician. In Black Power in America, Greaves and writer Lou Porter struggle to come to terms with the racial complexity of black America in the 1980s.</p>
<p>An enigmatic work, in which Wilson envisions the daydreams and fantasies of an eleven-year-old boy as a universe both magical and sinister. The pivotal image is a young boy looking through a large window in the kitchen of his home, which becomes the portal for his dramatic inner fantasies. Fire, metal, wind, glass and water, among other elements, serve as points of departure for a series of elegant pictorial compositions and evocative metaphors. Unfolding without dialogue, Wilson’s indelible visions articulate the fear and mystery of a child’s internal life and his relationship with the outside world.</p>
<p>Profile of a Problem Drinker is aimed at drinkers, family members and work colleagues who struggle to live with the difficulties alcohol addiction creates. Blood and Fire focuses on the Canadian Salvation Army’s devotion to improving the everyday spiritual lives of men, on the street and in jail, who are down on their luck. Stigma is about a young woman who has recovered from a mental breakdown, but around whom family and friends now feel uncomfortable.</p>
<p>A panorama of the complex situation of ‘middle-class’ African Americans in the late 1960s. Jacqueline Stewart has called the film “a tour de force exploration of the external and internal pressures that the Negro middle class faces at a watershed moment in American political history.” The film demonstrates how persistent racism negates the educational and professional accomplishments of African Americans working to join white society or to create a black society parallel to the more affluent white middle class, while being confronted by the development of black political and aesthetic militancy.</p>
<p>Spring equinox 2024: 20 March at three hours, six minutes, twenty-one seconds (GMT). Vattetot-sur-mer, in the Pays-de-Caux region of Normandy, Gaza is being bombed.</p>
<p>Much like its protagonists, Brad and Janet, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has had a fantastical and surreal journey into the spotlight. It started life in an 85-seat studio space at London’s Royal Court Theatre, before being adapted into a breakout cult movie that would become a midnight screening favourite, with a near-fanatical fanbase and a host of rituals, fanzines and spin-off events. Linus O’Brien’s hugely entertaining directorial debut traces Rocky Horror’s journey across the decades, highlighting why it has such staying power. Featuring interviews with creator Richard O’Brien, one of the film’s stars, Tim Curry, and a host of artists, critics and fans, including Jack Black and Trixie Mattell, Strange Journey is a joyous testament to this 50-year-old classic.</p>
<p>Sunless Haven animates dispersed fragments of historical documents and architectural remnants, looking at London’s river Thames as a resonant chamber connecting disparate worlds. It attempts to understand the docklands as a meeting place between different ecologies, enclosures and epochs; a point where the city and the world become entangled. It moves from the legacy of the police persecution of seamen to the experiences of London as recounted by Ayahs and Amahs—South Asian nannies who were abandoned in the city—and to Lao She’s pioneering novel, Mr Ma and Son, first published in 1929.</p>
<p>Under a burning sun, on an island on the border between Finland and Russia, two people rave. Tender wander or anxious waiting. What is there to fear on the horizon? The indolence of summer becomes stifling, while they seem to be the only ones foreseeing the upcoming disaster.</p>
<p>The rediscovery of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One in 1991, and the widespread recognition it received, prompted Greaves to consider returning to the original project, which had been developed on the assumption that funding would be available for five ‘Takes’. When it became clear that Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi would support a new Symbio experiment, Greaves brought one of the original couples, Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker (seen in Take One only briefly), back together to play their original characters, and be themselves, now 37 years older. Other veterans of Take One also take part.</p>
<p>William Greaves’s experimental and improvisational cinematic masterwork is about the making of the making of a movie. A film crew documents a series of actors who act out the same breakup scene over and over again, and then a second film crew documents the first team of filmmakers. Confused about their roles on the film, the crew meet to discuss the puzzling state of the production among themselves. What movie are they working on and to what purpose? Conflicts mount and tempers flare as the fraught crew members rebel against Greaves, who refuses to define the project or chart its direction. Set in New York City’s Central Park in 1968, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is an insightful and riotous observation of the psychology of performance and the sometimes tumultuous experience of collective art making.</p>
<p>An intimate chronicle of the war that devastated South Lebanon, leaving behind scorched land and a wounded community struggling to rebuild and find a semblance of peace.</p>
<p>Yusuf travels through Kurdish villages, collecting fading folktales to publish in a book. The film takes us on that journey. We witness his bond with Kurdish women, elders and children, and we see the family pressure, social taboos and financial struggles he faces. In spite of everything, he keeps going, even when he feels like giving up.</p>
<p>Gabriel Veyre was a cinematographer for the Lumière brothers and an inventor of cinema. Travelling with his camera, he was dedicated to capturing the wonderful vitality of the world around him on film for the first time. The first set of films, produced between 1896 and 1900, were shot in locations ranging from France to Indochina, Mexico, Japan and Canada, and are presented in restored copies. The second set of films were shot in Morocco between 1934 and 1935. These colour films reveal not only the conditions of life in the country, but also Veyre’s agile and sensitive approach to filmmaking.</p>
<p>Two music enthusiasts reunite after some years to record an improvised album in a secluded house in the Greek mountains. As they immerse in music and conversation, they confront themselves, creativity and a dark mystery lurking in the forest. “We’ve always been trying to do something with music. What if you’re just trying to do anything, like capture the essence of anythingness?”, reflects one of the protagonists. Could two friends confident with one another looking for a song in nature be an act of searching for the meaning of life?</p>
<p>What remains of the Natzweiler Struthof concentration camp, established by the Nazis in the Bruche valley in Alsace? The last remaining witnesses share their stories. Between topography of places and memory mapping, the accounts bring fragments of resistance back to light.</p>
<p>In an uncertain future, when Vietnam is about to be submerged, a son far from home re-imagines his family’s memories. This is Quý’s first feature, in which traces of his subsequent work can be found. A deeply atmospheric film, weaving intimacy through precise decisions and a confident play between multiple temporalities.</p>
<p>The first film shot entirely with polarised light. The filming was done by projecting pieces of glass directly onto the camera (the constantly changing images and colours become visible through a glass screen that divides the beam of light directed at the camera). The images are accompanied by music composed expressly by Luciano Berio. Fragmented, reduced to the infinitesimal, in space and time, the shapes and sounds continue to produce images: minimal, instantaneous events that the rhythm transforms into narrative and that populate the film like a kaleidoscope.</p>
<p>Greaves was interested in J. L. Moreno’s technique of psychodrama, which involves patients dramatising traumatic experiences in order to help them confront and overcome them. In the film In the Company of Men, a trained psychodramatist successfully works with groups of black workers and their white managers in a factory in the American Deep South. In The Deep North, the psychodrama method is used to explore racism in Greaves’ hometown of New York City.</p>
<p>Mitrovica is an ethnically divided city in Kosovo, home to both Albanians and Serbs. The landscape, frozen by conflict, narrates two poems about dying mothers. Two people appear to be lost in the ruins, while cherry trees blossom.</p>
<p>When the United States Information Agency wanted a news item about a major arts festival in Dakar, Senegal, Greaves was provided with minimal funding and equipment and a single cameraman. They trained their chauffeur to take sound and produced The First World Festival of Negro Arts, a poetic survey of the festival, featuring poet Langston Hughes. Produced for the United States Information Agency, Wealth of a Nation is Greaves’ personal paean to the fundamental importance of individual self-expression. From These Roots tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance in photographs.</p>
<p>In 1973, Vibeke Løkkeberg filmed the beginnings of the feminist film movement at the First International Women’s Film Seminar, held at the Arsenal cinema. Her footage was lost for 50 years. Today, it confronts us with past battles still yet to be won.</p>
<p>The landscape painter Antônio Parreiras enters the world of the dead. Wandering through darkness, forests and cities, he reunites with old friends, questions his art, and reflects on the history and future of a devastated country.</p>
<p>Emerging from the shadows of the rubber trade, the lost stories of Omarino and Aredomi are revealed. A journey through Amazonian archives connects research, speculation and the filmmaker’s own family history, invocating a dialogue between living and dead.</p>
<p>Pelu, a lonely projectionist in a dying cinema, loses his home and secretly moves into the theatre after being demoted. He turns it into a nocturnal refuge, hosting homeless friends and renting it to a camgirl, thereby reclaiming a sense of purpose. When his secret is exposed and the cinema closes down, Pelu defiantly breaks in to reclaim his home. A bittersweet ode to seventh art, which is not an escapist gesture, but rather a reminder of the inspiration that comes from togetherness and the essential need for community spaces, especially in times like these under the Milei administration.</p>
<p>In Bologna, there is a group of churches that were originally pagan temples dedicated to Isis before becoming Christian. In Porto, a student restoring a statue of the Virgin Mary contemplates its origins, weaving together the visible and the invisible.</p>
<p>The film travels at the pace of the seasons through the real and fictional story of a region in Portugal, the Alentejo, and the peoples who have lived there. It begins at a present with no memory and travels back in time to the immemorial time, before the invention of writing. Along the way, it crosses more or less distant pasts: the work and life of German archaeologists detained far away from home during WWII, through their archives and letters; the occupation of the land by the rural workers after the revolution in April 1974; stories kept in the collective memory. During this journey we meet women and men, old people and children, shepherds, hunters, beekeepers, archaeologist, teachers and storytellers, and also ruins, dolmens and a thousand-year old olive tree. All contribute, with their memories, believes and knowledge, to compose a poetic, political, multi-layered and polyphonic portrait of the region</p>
<p>Ahmad Natche’s final, unfinished film premiered posthumously at Doclisboa. In The Storyteller, we see a rehearsal for a new play at the El Hakawati theatre in Jerusalem. Ahmad Natche focuses more on those who watch, and on the empty chairs of an audience to come, than on the stage.</p>
<p>As the Olympian gods struggle to make sense of the end of their empire, a rebellion rises from the valley below. The film stars only poets who recite a script in dactylic hexameter—the metre of Greek epic—and examines how the forces of power often fail to recognise the frailty of their rule. Meanwhile, the oppressed realise they need not wait for the perfect storm to strike. The romantic title of the film, borrowed from Karl Marx’s unfinished play Oulanem, suggests that revolution and love both have the power to create sudden and magnificent disequilibrium.</p>
<p>There are two bus stops with the same name next to La Cumbre Palace, one going down and the other going up. The impassive building is sheltered within its walls while everyday life goes on outside. Bus number 19 passes, its passengers chatting inside.</p>
<p>"In Minh Quý Trương’s striking second feature, a man living on Mars in the year 2045 examines footage brought back from his encounters with an indigenous community in the jungles of Vietnam. As he experiments, his thoughts drift from matters of identity, aesthetics, and the politics of imagemaking, to ritual burial practices, to the seen and unseen forces that shape cultures. Combining elements of science fiction and ethnography, The Tree House is a powerful exploration of how time and environment relate to our understanding of home.", 57th New York Film Festival. (<a href="https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2019/films/the-tree-house/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">filmlinc.org/nyff2019/films/the-tree-house/</a>)</p>
<p>The winning short film of the Doc Alliance Award, We Had Fun Yesterday, explores the director’s fascination with images of nature. Wildlife films, natural parks and zoos are set in motion around her personal experience as a filmmaker, visual artist, ornithologist and woman. The Tree of Authenticity reveals the burden of the colonial past and its links to climate change in the heart of the Congo through the voices of scientists who worked there between 1910 and 1950. This riveting film reminds us of what lies ahead if we fail to change our relationship with the environment.</p>
<p>Gaspard, a teenager from the suburbs of Lisbon, falls into the hands of the Ogre, a man who has made a pact with the Devil. The Ogre uses the boy to attract tourists, whom he transforms into animals and then kills. Gaspard escapes with a donkey and a dog that he has grown fond of, and in an enchanted manor, he meets the spirit of Queen D. Maria I. Meanwhile, the enraged Ogre sets off in pursuit. Eugène Green, notable for drawing inspiration from Baroque theatre and for his idiosyncratic sense of humour, returns to Portugal for the third time to direct this playful and urgent fairy tale.</p>
<p>Abandoned houses, surviving objects that carry memory. Exiled from Iran after her film on the 2009 Green Movement was banned, a filmmaker breaks her family’s decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in Iran’s political prisons. Grappling with estrangement and loss, she uses fragments, archives, and the images made during her years of diaristic filming in Iran to reflect on the collective taboo, the fear that silenced the population for so many years, and the explosion of resistance that continues to grow within Iranian society today.</p>
<p>On a winter night in Berlin, Three of Cups explores love, identity and change among three friends—a non-binary artist, a trans woman, and a queer man—, blending fiction and documentary in poetic moments.</p>
<p>The man of the future will learn to shed the skin of guilt and rewrite himself. Nature has endowed him with the magic of dissatisfaction to evoke an eternal return to the roots, the branches, the caves, the hunt. Man’s instinct tells him to find his way home, yet at the same time, it makes him question the very notion of return. The ability to recognise guilt and embrace change is what distinguishes stopping time from hoping it will go faster.</p>
<p>Someone is sitting in the waiting room. The sound of the wind gradually changes into the screams of anti-abortion activists. Mary and Jesus cry. This is a film about waiting, abortion, abortion opponents, shame and filmmaking as a form of resistance.</p>
<p>Anna was 14 when her father, Toni Negri, was jailed on charges of being the secret mastermind behind the Red Brigades, the spearhead of Italian leftist terrorism. After 4 years in prison and 15 in exile, he became a world-renowned philosopher and his arrest and imprisonment just one chapter in his extraordinary life. For Anna, however, that event had a traumatic impact. Their relationship became a powerful, dramatic struggle. This is an attempt to understand the revolutionary mentality that characterised the last century, and to question the ethics of the violence and how individuals cope with defeat.</p>
<p>Shot on Mini DV and mostly in Paris, Towards the Light is a personal diary of exile. Through images of light, landscapes and memory, the film captures a year (2023) of reflective solitude in exile for Russian filmmaker Vadim Kostrov and his wife, artist Natasha Goncharova. A poetic meditation on displacement, loss and the search for light through darkness.</p>
<p>Two friends spend two days camping by the seaside in Portugal. Dedé’s previous brush with suicide and its consequences on their relationship are eventually addressed head-on. What they thought once brought them together may now push them apart.</p>
<p>Two Meters of This Land takes place on a summer evening in Ramallah (West Bank), where a popular music concert is being prepared, and will be broadcast on TV. “That same summer, the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish died and he was buried on a hilltop in Ramallah, very close to the outdoor theatre where I set my film” (Ahmad Natche). This film was the starting point for Shadowboxing. Its paradox is even more poignant today—it became an enduring concern for the future: How can you talk about a here without a now? The answer, according to Jean-Pierre Rehm, is to talk of yesterday.</p>
<p>This fully archival journey through the 35 years of Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay reveals unseen footage and explores one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, whose effects still resonate today.</p>
<p>Shot over the course of a decade at a sun-drenched villa in Provence, Vacances follows ‘Granny’, a bohemian Austro-Hungarian countess, as she imparts wisdom by the pool and looks for a successor among her descendants. Wearing swimsuits, the younger family members navigate her complex world, regressing under her scrutiny and resisting her advice. As summers pass and Granny’s influence fades, her heirs reassess her arcane teachings. They start to separate the valuable from the vexing in her legacy, readying themselves to move beyond the villa after the film’s final summer.</p>
<p>A video sketchbook, a visually dramatic and frequently humorous collection of one hundred short ‘episodes’ produced for television. Unfolding as a series of thirty-second vignettes, this stylistic essay is characterised by a deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions and the repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images are accompanied by an ‘architectural’ sound score that includes spoken ‘phonetic patterns’ rather than words. By fusing his surprising visual logic and rhythms with unexpected temporal manipulations, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry.</p>
<p>For some thirty years, from the 1980s until their decline in the 2010s, video shops were crucial arenas for film culture– and both highbrow and lowbrow American cinema has documented their rise, fall and changing meanings. Alex Ross Perry's Videoheaven, a labour of love ten years in the making, retraces this history using solely appropriated footage from a vast array of films, ranging from huge Hollywood productions to non-professional no-budget affairs, sold solely at their neighbourhood video shop.</p>
<p>This documentary focuses on the third part of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, which consists of a number of musical quotes from composers like Mahler, Stravinsky, Boulez, Schönberg and Stockhausen. Each quote is illustrated with rehearsal footage, interviews or performances of the original material. Images of a river connect each quote, just as Berio used a river as a connecting element in his composition: “A river running through a constantly changing landscape, disappearing from time to time, only to emerge later totally transformed.”</p>
<p>“When I was younger, I hated my body as much as I was obsessed by images of nature. On the one hand, I told myself that they were sublime, and that’s why they existed, and on the other, I had the impression that as a woman, if people didn’t look at me, I was going to disappear. I loved images so much that I forgot what was real.” - Marion Guillard</p>
<p>When the United States Information Agency wanted a news item about a major arts festival in Dakar, Senegal, Greaves was provided with minimal funding and equipment and a single cameraman. They trained their chauffeur to take sound and produced The First World Festival of Negro Arts, a poetic survey of the festival, featuring poet Langston Hughes. Produced for the United States Information Agency, Wealth of a Nation is Greaves’ personal paean to the fundamental importance of individual self-expression. From These Roots tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance in photographs.</p>
<p>David Lynch, an artist fascinated by the most deviant depths of the human soul, has composed his oeuvre like a riddle to decipher, on the cusp between dreams and reality. From Eraserhead to Twin Peaks, Lynch has been taking us through the looking glass to explore the strange foundations of the American dream. This film revisits his work, gives voice to his closest collaborators (Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini, among others) and traces his inspirations, such as Francis Bacon’s paintings. Cinema will never be the same without David Lynch.</p>
<p>Street cats, islands of light, flings, losses, and conscriptions. Eva Neymann portrays the people of Odesa and their cats with gentle care, seeking to reveal their dreams when war has destroyed all certainty. The Ukrainian filmmaker, who premiered Pryvoz in the International Competition at Doclisboa 2021, has shot all her films in Odesa since her student days, and thus knows the city’s secrets. This film, full of memories and dreams, is inspired by the surreal beauty of Ten Nights of Dreams, by Natsume Sōseki. It is a rare gesture of humanism, depicting a tragic moment in the country’s history.</p>
<p>In the late 1980s, a team of Ukrainian filmmakers undertook several film expeditions to remote areas of Siberia. Their forgotten film reels were rediscovered in Kyiv in 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This mesmerising archive is a starting point for a film essay that interrogates Russian imperialism, resource extraction, environmental destruction and the ongoing oppression and erasure of Indigenous peoples in Russia’s colonies, from the time of the Tsars through the Soviet era and the present day.</p>
<p>A pedestrian (the filmmaker) equipped with a tiny pocket camera wanders through Brussels and encounters Polish, Iranian, Brazilian, Belgian and Moroccan workers. They slip small pieces of paper into the columns, the walls, and the floors of construction sites: secret wishes intended for future generations. As she roams the city, filming the messages hidden behind bricks, under cobblestones, on traffic poles and at the bases of statues, the wanderer wonders: “You may be walking on a builder’s wish.”</p>
<p>Rediscovered MiniDV footage from Gaza in 2001 frames the filmmaker’s search for a former prison‑mate, accompanied by Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. As they journey from north to south Gaza, the film evokes memory, loss, and the fleeting beauty of everyday life in a place forever changed</p>