The ‘So Many Stories Left Untold’ themed presentation, which runs January 14 to 20, presents 16 films across Lisbon venues, as well as talks and debates.
“Narrating, representing and detourning (hi)stories from our collective past is the motto for Doclisboa’s upcoming moment,” says the festival before the fourth of seven programmes scheduled to run from October 2020 through to 31 March 2021. During this ‘moment’ the festival aims to reframe history “in order to reroute and subvert its meaning.”
Doclisboa will present 16 films in January, one of which will be a world premiere (Visões do Império by Portuguese director Joana Pontes) while three will enjoy international premieres (A Maior Massa de Granito do Mundo by Luis Felipe Labaki (Brazil), Everything May Go Awry by Christophe Derouet (France) and Laurent Achard’s Jean-François Stévenin – Simple Men (France).
Visões do Império is a film about the Portuguese colonial empire as seen and presented through photography, from the end of the 19th Century until the 1974 Carnation Revolution that put an end to the political regime that had ruled Portugal. It is a film, says the festival, “that proposes a revisitation of Portugal’s colonial past through diverse family archives – starting with Joana Pontes’ own.”
To expand upon the film’s themes and investigations, a special screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker and guests at Lisbon’s Monument to the Discoveries, a physical emblem of the country’s Salazar era. Additionally, the “Cinema to Fight Racism” strand (programmed by SOS Racismo) “proposes a deep reflection on the subject [of racism] mirrored in the collective perspective of our society.”
Other films of note in January’s programme include the Portuguese premieres of Numbers, the latest film by Oleg Sentsov, a past winner of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2018, The Exit of the Trains by Romanian Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflânc, and The Last City by Heinz Emigholz. Paula Gaitán returns for the second time to this year’s festival, with her visionary epic Luz nos Trópicos, starring Portuguese actor Carloto Cotta, whilst the cinema of the Syrian Mohammad Malas can be doubly assessed via his film, The Dream, and Nezar Andary’s portrait of the director, Unlocking Doors of Cinema.
Three further festival ‘moments’ will be presented 4-10 February and then twice in March, during which audiences can (among other things) celebrate the mythical punk rock of the Portuguese band Mata-Ratos, and attend screenings of James Benning’s Grand Opera: An Historical Romance (recently restored by the Austrian Film Museum) and Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall (named by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma magazine as the best film of 2020).
The 18th edition of Doclisboa continues after a year marked by many challenges, the festival underlines, and maintains a dialogue with all venues to ensure that all sessions are safely held. Above all, the festival serves to reaffirm the importance of cinema as a space of encounter and debate.
“Doclisboa first of all aims to be a place of encounter between audience and films that defy preconception and notions of documentary,” co-director Miguel Ribeiro told Business Doc Europe in 2020. “Very curious and attentive audiences visit the festival every year, and it is through [subsequent] debates and collective reflections that Doclisboa can continuously evolve into a place where you can really rethink the relationship between cinema and the real.”
