The 23rd Doclisboa kicks off October 16 with Palestinian Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza, heralding 11 packed days of festival and industry activity. This year’s selection sees 211 films from 54 countries, including 93 feature films and 118 short films. The program also includes 39 world premieres and 31 Portuguese works, offering “a comprehensive portrait of contemporary life and its multiple realities and challenges,” organisers write.
The selections are, as Lisbon cineastes are happily aware, always shot through with a highly cinematic aesthetic, as exemplified by the 12 films in International Competition and the dozen films selected for Portuguese Competition.
“We definitely look at Doclisboa as a festival that believes first of all in cinema as a real artistic form,” director Hélder Beja tells Business Doc Europe on the eve of the festival’s 23rd roll-out. “We’re looking for the singular gestures and approaches that are still possible, [and] we interested in exploring all the vanishing boundaries between different genres, of course between documentary and fiction but also between essay and non-fiction. What we do every year is to encapsulate an idea, and a view of the documentary cinema that has been produced over the past 12 months.”
Of the dozen films in Doclisboa’s International Competition, 11 are world premieres, the exception being the Chilean Letters to My Dead Parents by Ignacio Agüero, which receives its Portuguese premiere.
While the festival has a strong Industry section (interview with Nebulae Head Marina Thomé to follow in Business Doc Europe), the establishing ethos of the festival is to serve well the Portuguese capital’s savvy and cine-literate public audience. “The professional space of Doclisboa festival has a very strong relevance, but the [public-facing] programmes are the heart, the lungs, the kidneys of the festival. They are what made Doclisboa what it is today.”
“We really are strong defenders of the film theatre as a collective space, and of cinema as a collective experience,” he further underlines.
This year, Beja has specifically targeted the city’s educational establishments, as well as locations housing parallel cultural disciplines, in order to attract wider audiences to the festival. Every year Doclisboa attracts approximately 20,000 viewers, but he would like to get that number to over 25,000.
“When I was running a literature festival in Macao, where I lived for many years, universities were one of the core aspects to be able to generate new audiences and we hope we can do something similar here,” says Beja.
The festival is also upping the ante in 2025 in terms of visibility by “reoccupying the public space,” he adds. “We are going to tag the city, the city calçadas, the sidewalks – everywhere – with our motto: “In October, the whole world fits in Lisbon.’”
Naturally, Portuguese documentary is in the ascendant again at Doclisboa, with the festival acting as a hub for the local sector’s creatives and their high-quality output. That said, like their counterparts across Europe and the rest of the world, Portuguese docmakers are working within limited resources. “I will steal something that Miguel Gomes, one of our best living filmmakers, said, that one thing that makes Portuguese cinema so creative and so unique is its unfortunate lack of means. So people have to do a lot with a little, but I think you see brilliant exercises coming out of that place,” Beja opines of the mental mindset needed to create a lot out of a little. “Of course, it’s unfair, but creativity really sparks out of the most unlikely places.” Beja is delighted, therefore, and not a little astonished, that he and his colleagues received nearly 300 submissions from Portuguese filmmakers for the 2025 edition.
In determining “who the Portuguese Competition is for, and what we want the competition to be,” Beja and his colleagues widened the scope of selections to encompass the most eclectic mix of films “from all walks of life.”
The festival director therefore highlights newcomer Duarte Coimbra, who presents his short Andar com Fé, as a significant new talent from “a different generation of filmmaking that is gaining its own, important space here in Portugal.” Meanwhile, Hiroatsu Suzuki and Rossana Torres examine rural Portugal (specifically the Guadiana River) in their Água Mãe, as does Maureen Fazendeiro in The Seasons. Both are feature docs.
“In other gestures, you have the eroticism and the body presence of Three of Cups, the short film by Mário Macedo and Enotea,” Beja continues. “And you have a really beautiful experimental film [with beautiful acting] in Gold and Ashes by Salomé Lamas.” He further emphasises the feature doc Complô by João Miller Guerra, about a Cape Verdean rapper on the streets of Lisbon, “an orphan of the country where he was born, an orphan of the Portuguese state. Imprisoned for half of his life, yet always free.”
Then there’s the provocatively titled hybrid film Fuck the Polis by Rita Azevedo Gomes, which Beja describes as a “crazy, beautiful film.” In the work, news of a fatal illness takes Irma to Greece, the land of clarity, where she embarks on a journey dictated by the god Apollo and guided by sacred sites.
“We have other particularities. For example, the Portuguese competition has some films that are not directed by Portuguese filmmakers,” Beja continues. “We have Firewood by this very interesting Spanish filmmaker Manel Raga Raga, which is a Portuguese production, and then we have the well-known Portuguese director Rodrigo Areias partnering with the US director Aaron Bruckner to bring us this quite unexpected Nova ’78, with unseen archive images of William S. Burroughs.” In the film the anarchic novelist returns to the US to the attend the 3-day titular event in New York City, alongside Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and many more.
Elsewhere in the festival program (and as previously reported in BDE), the Heart Beat section seeks to span “multiple art forms and expressions,” in the process presenting a plethora of new works, such as Welcome to Lynchland by Stéphane Ghez, which delves into the work of the pop surrealist; Becoming Madonna by Michael Ogden, and It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley by Amy Berg. Local filmmaker Diogo Varela Silva returns to the festival with Punch for Punch, about Orlando Jesus who, in the 1970s, was more than just a boxer – he was also a symbol of a tough and marginalized Lisbon. “It is a portrait that preserves his memory and that of the city that shaped him, in stark contrast to today’s Lisbon,” the festival writes. Pele Nómada by João Fiadeiro and Aline Belfort, is a film about memory and transformation. Set in a Lisbon marked by gentrification, it follows Fiadeiro as he packs up and transports the RE.AL studio to be archived in Serralves.
The 23rd edition of Doclisboa also celebrates the 100th anniversary of Italian composer Luciano Berio’s birth with a special program of four “rare and essential films that explore the relationship between music, image, memory, and experimentation.” These are: Il canto d’amore di Prufrock (1967) by Nico D’Alessandria, inspired by T. S. Eliot’s poem of the same name; Sirènes (1961) by Emile Degelin, an experimental film based on James Joyce’s poem The Sirens; The Colours of Light (1963) by Bruno Munari and Marcello Piccardo, which investigates light and colour within the conceptual presence of Berio; and Frank Scheffer’s Voyage to Cythera (1999) which focuses on the third part of Berio’s Symphony, transforming musical quotations from Mahler, Stravinsky, and Boulez into a continuous flow of sounds and images, guided by the composer himself.
Core to the festival’s From the Earth to the Moon section are the works of three true documentary heavyweights: Werner Herzog with Ghost Elephants, Lucrecia Martel with Landmark, and Oscar-winner Laura Poitras with Cover-up, which she co-directed with Mark Obenhaus.
Beja is particularly excited about this year’s retrospective, on African-American filmmaker, artist and activist William Greaves (1926-2014). “Some of us [in the programming team] were more familiar with the work of Greaves than others, but it was a beautiful [re]discovery for everyone,” says Beja.
“He was not only a man very much involved in the civic rights movements, documenting the struggle of black people in North America, which he did intensively and with a lot of passion, but he was also an incredible artist and a very experimental avant-garde filmmaker. We were, first of all, very enthusiastic about his work and secondly it matched a very important criteria for us to do a retrospective of an artist who is not so well known, not even in his own country.”
In terms of an ideal take-away at the end of his first edition as Festival Director, Beja looks to the twin constituencies of filmmakers and audience. “We need to care for the people that bring the films here, and we need to care for the people that come to watch the films – it’s like a mantra,” he says.
“Of course, if we manage to have more audience than we had in in the last few years that will also make me really happy, because that will mean that more films have found their public. I think that is one of the greatest things we can we can do here is to activate critical thinking and to create empathy, and to fight the lack of humanism that is contaminating every country around the world,” Beja signs off. “If all of those aspects come together in the end, and if the team is also not completely destroyed by tiredness by the time the festival finishes, then I’ll be a very happy man.”
