| The programme for Doclisboa'23 is now known; the festival will take place between 19 and 29 October at the usual venues: Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema and Cinema Ideal. In all, the 21st edition of Doclisboa is showing 250 films from 42 countries, including 35 world premieres and 39 Portuguese films. The films reveal the pulse of the world and those who inhabit it. Doclisboa travels to the inside of the human brain through the lens of Werner Herzog (Theater of Thought), and to the pressing issues of work in The Liberated Broom, Listen to the Story I Was Told, by Coline Grando; delves into memories of past wars and to the current war in Ukraine (Vyrai, Magdalena Mistygacz, Jakub Stoszek; Waking Up in Silence, Mila Zhluktenko, Daniel Asadi Faezi); film archives (The Cemetery of Cinema, Thierno Souleymane Diallo); music (Lovano Supreme, Franco Maresco; Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin, Katia deVidas); and dance (Seven Jereles, Pedro G. Romero, Gonzalo García Pelayo). The press conference was held this morning at Culturgest and was hosted by Miguel Ribeiro (Director of Doclisboa), Mark Deputter (Chairman of the Board – Culturgest), Marco Guerra (Head of the Cultural Action Division – CML), and José Manuel Costa (President of the Cinemateca Portuguesa – Cinema Museum). Also taking part were Wang Bing – via videoconference – director of Man in Black, the festival's opening film, and Leonor Teles, director of Baan, which will close this year's event. Man in Black is a film that is as beautiful as it is brutal: 86-year-old Wang Xilin is one of China's most important contemporary classical composers, a “man in black”, whose life has been marked by unspeakable suffering, yet charged with sincere and visible compassion. Baan shows the elusive effect of home – of a house that no longer feels like home – and of time, space and emotions that, as they implode, juxtapose and blur Lisbon and Bangkok together. |
Miguel Ribeiro, Leonor Teles, Agnes Meng and Wang Bing (videocall) “We tried for Baan to be a portrait of this generation of young people who are trying to live in this very chaotic and difficult Lisbon, and of how it's like for us to continue to live and feel the challenges we now have, which are quite different from those that my parents' generation, for example, faced.” Leonor Teles “First of all I was interested in this man, this character, we've known each other for 20 years, I really like his work as a composer. But we can't separate his music and his personal experience from the history of China, it's all connected to the political reality. (…) I spoke to Wang Xilin about making a film [Man in Black] about him in Paris, I had this vision of him naked in front of the camera [in an empty theatre]. The structure of the theatre is very beautiful, it impressed me, and if you look at it from above it really does look like an ancient tomb of an Emperor in China.” Wang Bing During the meeting with the press, films from the programme were introduced that reflect the permanent dialogue between past and future that characterises cinema: Portrait of Gina, a previously unreleased Orson Welles film, to be shown for the first time in Portugal, and Stephen Kijak's documentary, Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, about the 1950s actor and heartthrob, celebrate Hollywood's golden age, while the retrospective dedicated to the cinema of the American New Deal period, programmed in collaboration with the Cinemateca Portuguesa, portrays a country in turmoil. With an eye to the future that is already here, Human, not Human, by Natan Castay, follows a man who spends hours blurring faces on Google Street View for a penny each, sinking into a robotised world that raises the question of humanity. And Markku Lehmuskallio shows the pressures exerted by man and technology on the natural world in Sounds of the Northern Forest, one of the films in the joint retrospective with Anastasia Lapsui that Doclisboa is presenting. This year's International Competition is travelling to 16 countries, including Portugal, and features 6 world premieres. Of the 39 Portuguese films in this year's edition, 9 are part of the Portuguese Competition and, out of these, 7 are world premieres. From the Earth to the Moon brings a palette of 23 cinematic possibilities, from the darkness of the trials of the military juntas of the last Argentinian dictatorship revealed by Ulises de La Orden in The Trial; to the light emanating from the Algarve community of the Culatra Island in the 1970s, filmed by Amilcar Lyra in Areia, Lodo e Mar, and the territory of the native village of Guarani filmmaker Alberto Álvares, who together with José Cury reminds us, in Yvy Pyte – Coração da Terra, that every border is an invention. The science fiction-tinged landscapes of Strata Incognita, by the collectives Grandeza Studio and Locument, are just as poignant as the violent traditions of the Belarusian military in Motherland, by Alexander Mihalkovich and Hanna Badziaka, or the stories of violence captured by Danielle Arbid's lens in a remembrance of Lebanon's civil war (A Killer; Alone with War). From the Earth to the Moon also features films by Nafis Fathollahzadeh, Maxime Martinot, Uma Celma, Julien Elie, Veljko Vidak, Coline Grando and Nicolas Peduzzi. |
| The 21 films programmed for the Heart Beat section once again reveal it as the pulsating core of Doclisboa: Let the Canary Sing, an intimate portrait of Cyndi Lauper signed by Alison Ellwood; Big Bang Henda, by Fernanda Polacow, a journey through the creations and reflections of Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda; the roots of Spanish flamenco in Seven Jereles, by Pedro G. Romero and Gonzay García Peléon; and the story of a group of queer athletes who decide to honour outcasts and show us how it is done in Life Is Not a Competition, But I'm Winning, by Julia Fuhr Mann, join the previously announced films dedicated to Luis Ospina, Joan Baez and Luis Miguel Cintra. But that is not all: Heart Beat also delves into the life and work of the extraordinary Agnès Varda (Viva Varda!, Pierre-Henri Gibert), and also shows films by Jan Moss, Wincy Oyarce, Pedro Florêncio, Patricia Allio and Justine Harbonnier. In the New Visions section, the already announced works by guest filmmakers Mika Taanila and Paula Gaitán are joined by the event that is Frente a Guernica, the new film by Yervant Gianikian and the late Angela Ricci Lucchi, a project they conceived of together, like so many others by the duo, and which, in Gianikian's words, is a “political, artistic and historical work about the violence of the 20th century”. In Portugal, Edgar Pêra revisits the work and heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa in a surprising psychological-literary thriller: Não Sou Nada – The Nothingness Club. Other highlights include Revolution+1, in which subversive film rebel Masao Adachi reconstructs the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and works by Luciana Fina, Peter Schreiner and the collective Terrorismo de Autor, all part of a section that is always on the lookout for irreverence and experimentation. Included in the New Visions section, Shadowboxing is a new feature in this year's edition, curated by Cíntia Gil and Jean-Pierre Rehm, drawing up a possible world – a worldview driven by a decisive and precise interest in cinema, imagined by two programmers who dialogue in images and movements – from Crashing Waves (Lucy Kerr) to The Connection (Shirley Clarke). From the Green Years section, the place par excellence for young contemporary filmmakers, the highlights include 19 premieres from 15 countries and a collaboration with the Helsinki University of the Arts, a privileged window from which to look at Finnish cinema today. The abcDoc programme for education is once again focused on the power of documentaries as a pedagogical tool and a starting point for connections with other worlds. Nebulae, the festival's programme and space dedicated to industry and networking, runs from 19 to 24 October, and promotes activities and meetings that foster the development, creation, production and dissemination of different independent film Constellations. Together, they complete the wide-ranging programme and intervention space that Doclisboa aims to build each year. All the details of the programme, juries, competitive sections and awards (including the new Rights and Freedoms Award) are now available at doclisboa.org. The box offices at Culturgest, Cinema Ideal, and Cinemateca, as well as online with Blueticket and Ticketline, are now officially open. |
Roaring Hope at Doclisboa’23
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About the author
Rouven Linnarz
Ever since I watched Takeshi Kitano's "Hana-Bi" for the first time (and many times after that) I have been a cinephile. While much can be said about the technical aspects of film, coming from a small town in Germany, I cherish the notion of art showing its audience something which one does normally avoid, neglect or is unable to see for many different reasons. Often the stories told in films have helped me understand, discover and connect to something new which is a concept I would like to convey in the way I talk and write about films. Thus, I try to include some info on the background of each film as well as a short analysis (without spoilers, of course), an approach which should reflect the context of a work of art no matter what genre, director or cast. In the end, I hope to pass on my joy of watching film and talking about it.
