Doclisboa's retrospectives are moments distinguished by curatorial projects that aim to offer a precise and comprehensive vision of the themes and filmmakers to which they are dedicated; the preview session that will take place on the terrace of the Cinemateca Portuguesa on the 7th of July at 21h30, will be a first glimpse into this year's programme.
This year Doclisboa, in partnership with Cinemateca Portuguesa, dedicates its thematic retrospective to the delicate coalition of radical filmmakers who, in the midst of the Great Depression, fought to birth the new genre of Social Documentary as a tool for socio-political change in the USA.
In parallel to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's commitment to social justice through the policies of his government's New Deal in the 1930s, a generation of filmmakers sought to infuse facts with feelings, art with agitprop and propaganda, through a cinema of reality that sought to communicate, and perhaps even help resolve, the significant social issues of turbulent, troubled times.
From the self-proclaimed ‘revolutionary' output and weaponised cameras of independent groups such as the Film and Photo League and Frontier Films, to epic ‘musical documentaries' financed and produced by the US Government itself, the retrospective will focus on the affinities and conflicts between a core group of filmmakers – including Ralph Steiner, Irving Lerner, Willard Van Dyke, Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz, Herbert Kline, Pare Lorentz and Joris Ivans – to chart a unique decade of possibilities, experiments and challenges to both cinema and society, whilst showing how many of today's crises are reflected in those of our past.
Doclisboa will also present another momentous retrospective – with the support of the Finnish Film Foundation – dedicated to the cinema of Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio: this is the first complete retrospective dedicated to the filmmakers.
Anastasia Lapsui, director and screenwriter, born in 1944 in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, then territory of the Soviet Union, and Markku Lehmuskallio, director and director of photography, born in 1938 in Finland, have dedicated their lives and their work together to the indigenous peoples of the North: the Sami, Inuit, Nenets, Chukchi and Selkup, among others. In attempting to convey the ways of seeing and the culture of these peoples, whom they film through a wide variety of cinematic approaches, they have documented their lives and created a unique body of work.
Lehmuskallio worked as a forester in Finland and was introduced to filmmaking while creating instructional films. Lapsui, born into a nomadic family, was the first Indigenous radio journalist in Yamal. Their filmography includes the first Finnish feature in which the Sami people speak their own language, as well as Seven Songs from the Tundra, the first narrative film ever made in the Nenets language. While their cinematic project became a great anthropological study, it is – even – more than that. Nature, ecology, forests and the animal kingdom, plus our planet itself, are among the essential themes they adventurously approach. Lapsui and Lehmuskallio carry on the Flaherty legacy, without, however, repeating its approach. Their films can be seen as a collection of different possibilities for cinema to exist (perhaps, that is why the idea of painting and of how to turn reality into fiction is a recurrent motif in their ouevre).
The films Footnote to Fact, by Lewis Jacobs (USA, 1933, 8'), Millions of Us, by Jack Smith [Slavko Vorkapich] and Tina Taylor (USA, 1936, 17'), and Hands, by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke (USA, 1934, 4'), will be screened as a preview of the retrospective Documentary on the March: The Turbulent 30s in New Deal America.
The session will continue with the film, Anna, by Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio (Finland / 1997 / 58'), to present the retrospective dedicated to the directors Anastasia Lapsui & Markku Lehmuskallio.
