Luciana Fina’s Sempre, which recently world-premiered in Venice, will open Doclisboa 2024.
“The Carnation Revolution and its echoes will be everywhere at the opening of the 22nd edition of Doclisboa, which this year runs from October 17 to 27,” the festival writes. “50 years later, [Sempre] revisits and brings to the present the films, images, faces and forgotten or unfulfilled ideals of the revolution.”
“In this landmark year for our country, Doclisboa is pleased to share the opening and closing films and the second retrospective of its 22nd edition. This is the first look at a rich programme that generates a conversation between a present, a past and a future, where a series of necessary reflections on the cinema of our time converge in diverse and unexpected ways.”
Festival organisers continue: “Luciana Fina, an Italian artist who’s lived in Portugal since the 1990’s and who presented Andromeda at Doclisboa last year, now returns to premiere a film that is as powerful as it is disenchanted about April 25th 1974. Sempre is a film made of films – it was based on an invitation from the Cinemateca Portuguesa to create an installation on the occasion of the Revolution’s 50th anniversary, using the national film archive and RTP’s image repository.
“Using excerpts from a variety of more or less well known works, and a remarkable research and editing work, Luciana Fina draws a portrait of a bygone and utopian time. At the same time, using sound recordings of moments from the present, the director transports these archive images into contemporary times, placing them in dialogue with today’s struggles – from the housing crisis to climate justice, from women’s rights to the rights of cultural workers, confronting us with all that remains to be done.”
The closing film of Doclisboa will be O Dia Que Te Conheci (The Day I Met You) by Brazilian André Novais Oliveira.
The festival writes of “a cinema that steps back from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to portray a much more complex country in all its simplicity. In the naturalistic, almost documentary style that characterizes his works, Novais Oliveira settles in his territory (Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, the suburbs) and presents us with a kind of unintentional romantic comedy. The Day I Met You is the story of a man and a woman (Renato Novais and Grace Passô) who try to stay afloat in a disjointed world, and who one day meet.”
“The romantic comedy aspect wasn’t very thought through, but instead the humour, trying to bring humour to the film. This goes back to my short film Fantasmas, which I made in 2010. It’s humorous and most of the films I’ve directed deal with relationships and love affairs,” says the director, who will be present in Lisbon.
