The film is described by the festival as “a cinematic reflection on memory, loss, and the passage of time, capturing an ancient Gaza and lives that may never intersect again.”
In ‘With Hasan in Gaza’, Kamal Aljafari revisits video footage taken in 2001 with a guide, Hasan, during a journey along the Gaza Strip in search of Abdel Rahim, a man the director met during his adolescence in 1989 when he was in an Israeli prison.
Kamal Aljafari forgot about these recordings and only came across the tapes more than two decades later, assembling this film, which has already been showcased at festivals in Locarno and Toronto, presenting a panorama of Gaza both past and present.
The 23rd edition of Doclisboa runs until the 26th across Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa, and Cinema Ideal, featuring 211 films, including 31 Portuguese works.
“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 and inviting us—in a gesture of creativity and resistance—to continue inhabiting this world,” states the DocLisboa direction in an explanatory text.
The Portuguese competition includes a dozen short and feature-length films, such as ‘A baía dos tigres’ by Carlos Conceição, ‘Andar com fé’ by Duarte Coimbra, both making their world premiere, and ‘Fuck the Polis’ by Rita Azevedo Gomes, which won the grand prize at the Marseille festival (France) in July.
The festival’s program highlights a “significant moment” with the screening of ‘As Brigadas Revolucionárias na Luta Contra a Ditadura (1970-1974)’, a documentary by Luiz Gobern Lopes on anti-fascist movements during the Estado Novo regime.
DocLisboa will also feature the premiere of the full version—over five hours long—of ‘O Riso e a Faca’, a film by Pedro Pinho awarded in Cannes (Best Actress award for Cleo Diára).
In the ‘Heart Beat’ section, ‘Memórias do Teatro da Cornucópia’, a film by Solveig Nordlund utilizing archival footage from various performances of the company founded by Luís Miguel Cintra and Jorge Silva Melo from its inception in 1973 until its closure in 2016, will be presented.
This same section will pay tribute to American director Robert Wilson, alongside films featuring musicians like Jeff Buckley, Madonna, Duran Duran, and Andy Kaufman.
In June, Doclisboa had already announced a retrospective dedicated to American director William Greaves, in partnership with Cinemateca Portuguesa.
Franco-American director Eugène Green will be in Lisbon to present, closing the Doclisboa, the film ‘A Árvore do Conhecimento’, which explores a story about a teenager, an ogre, and a dark pact, “in a critique not always subtle on how the city succumbed to tourism,” describes the festival.
