A 23rd edition of the Doclisboa – International Film Festival was presented today in Lisbon by the new management team, led by Hélder Beja, unveiling some of the more than 200 films to be screened between October 16 and 26.
“These films do not shy away from conflict or memory; instead, they embrace them, finding in cinema a way to traverse history, culture, and ideas, inviting us—in a gesture of creativity and resistance—to continue inhabiting this world,” states the festival’s directorship in their explanatory text.
This year, the festival will be spread across Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa, and Cinema Ideal, featuring 211 films from 54 countries, including 31 Portuguese works.
The Portuguese competition includes a dozen short and feature films, such as ‘A baía dos tigres’ by Carlos Conceição and ‘Andar com fé’ by Duarte Coimbra, both enjoying their world premieres, along with ‘Fuck the Polis’ by Rita Azevedo Gomes, which won the grand prize at the Marseille festival in France this July.
DocLisboa opens with a focus on Palestine through the film ‘With Hasan in Gaza’ by Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari, described as “an urgent homage to resistance in Gaza,” built from footage shot in 2001 when the filmmaker, together with a friend Hasan Elboubou, searched for a former prison companion with whom he was detained in 1989 as a teenager.
For Doclisboa, “this is a ‘road movie'” traversing “a territory in resistance” where the ordinary life of its inhabitants coexists with the ongoing violence of the occupation.
In the introductory note for this year’s DocLisboa, Hélder Beja also reflects that “cinema is certainly not the solution to the tragedy of war, the massacre, the genocide of a people, the rise of nationalism and new fascism, or the environmental crisis drying even ideas.”
“But cinema is, or at least can be, a place to think about the world and ponder on it,” he states.
From its programming, the festival highlights “an unmissable moment” with the screening of ‘As Brigadas Revolucionárias na Luta Contra a Ditadura (1970-1974),’ a documentary by Luiz Gobern Lopes on the anti-fascist movements during the Estado Novo regime.
The DocLisboa program will also feature the premiere of the complete version—over five hours—of ‘O Riso e a Faca’ by Pedro Pinho, the Cannes award-winning film for Best Actress, Cleo Diára.
In the ‘Heart Beat’ section, ‘Memórias do Teatro da Cornucópia’ by Solveig Nordlund will be shown, constructed from archival footage of various performances by the company founded by Luís Miguel Cintra and Jorge Silva Melo, from its inception in 1973 to its closure in 2016.
In this same section, tributes will be paid to American director Robert Wilson, who recently passed away, and Italian composer Luciano Berio, born a hundred years ago in October 1925, along with films featuring musicians like Jeff Buckley, Madonna, Duran Duran, and Andy Kaufman.
In June, Doclisboa announced a retrospective dedicated to the documentary cinema of American director William Greaves, in partnership with the Portuguese Cinemateca.
Among this year’s guests is Canadian director Denis Côte, who will present the film “Paul,” about a man suffering from depression and social anxiety, who has created a “deeply submissive character that finds success on Instagram.”
Franco-American director Eugène Green will be in Lisbon to present ‘A Árvore do Conhecimento’ at the close of Doclisboa, a film that fabulizes a story about a teenager, an ogre, and a dark pact “in a critique not always veiled against how the city yielded to tourism,” according to the festival.
The DocLisboa – International Film Festival, dedicated mainly to documentaries, has been directed by Hélder Beja since March, with Boris Nelepo and Cíntia Gil serving as programmers.
