The programme of the 19th edition of Doclisboa was unveiled October 7 in the presence of the festival’s co-directors Joana Gusmão, Joana de Sousa and Miguel Ribeiro. The fest will take 21-31 October, in the festival’s usual venues – Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museum of Cinema, Cinema Ideal, Cinema City Campo Pequeno, Museu do Oriente and Museu do Aljube.
The festival, which returns to its original eleven-day format, presents a program consisting of 249 films – 51 world premieres and 28 international premieres – composed of competitive and non-competitive sections: International Competition, National Competition, New Visions, From the Earth to the Moon, Heart Beat, Ulrike Ottinger Retrospective, Cecilia Mangini Retrospective, Cinema of Urgency, Green Years and Doc Alliance.
The International Competition features 13 films from 14 different territories – “films with a unique look at the world and at cinema, with a formal and aesthetic diversity that question the world in its different fronts,” writes the festival. A selection with many world premieres that brings to the festival the most recent works by Elisabeth Perceval and Nicolas Klotz, Thiago B. Mendonça, Sebastian Mihăilescu, Mengqi Zhang, Aline Lata and Helena Wolfenson, Vadim Kostrov, Roberto Santaguida, Clément Abbey, Arantza Santesteban, Aïssata Ouarma, Eva Neymann, Baya Medhaffar, Thunska Pansittivorakul and Phassarawin Kulsomboon.
Of the 46 Portuguese films of this year’s edition, 11 make up the Portuguese Competition and seven are world premieres. Anna Artemyeva, Catarina Botelho, João Lameira, Salomé Lamas, Melanie Pereira, Leonardo Mouramateus, José Oliveira and Marta Ramos, Pedro Figueiredo Neto and Ricardo Falcão, Tiago Afonso, José Vieira and Silas Tiny “offer proposals that reveal different ways of thinking and acting on what surrounds us, in diverse spaces and times in which narratives are constructed,” writes the festival.
Doclisboa also unveils the New Visions program: a section “where we explore the different languages of cinema, placing bold and innovative new propositions and tendencies in filmmaking into dialogue with radical moments from cinema’s past.” This year, the festival honours the Colombian filmmaker Luis Ospina, to whom the festival dedicated a complete retrospective in 2018, with a program that includes The Eye of the Tourist, a posthumous work by Ospina.
The New Visions invited guest directors are Michael Pilz (who dedicates his latest With Love #3 to Khosrow Sinai) and Edgar Pêra (who invokes the spectrality and immersive nature of cinema through 3D images of his latest film and is also invited to curate a session of the film Jackass 3D).
In addition to the thematic programmes, the festival will present ‘Egyptian Women in Cinema: Perspectives from 1970 to Today’, curated by researcher Mathilde Rouxel who, based on the work of 3 Egyptian filmmakers, reflects on the Egyptian people and their struggles, both past and present.
Within the scope of FILMar project, operated by the Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema and part of the EEA Grants Financial Support Mechanism, the festival will screen the restored copy of Nazaré, Praia de Pescadores by José Leitão de Barros. The session will be accompanied on the piano by the Portuguese composer Filipe Raposo, who will present his own score, in a world premiere.
The festival will also welcome the presence of many directors, who will be in Lisbon to present their films, including Ulrike Ottinger – who will present her retrospective, Avi Mograbi, Vitaly Mansky, Helke Misselwitz, Nicolas Klotz, Elisabeth Perceval, Marta Popivoda, Sergio Silva, Boris Lehman, among many others.
Nebulae, Doclisboa’s networking space, is returning in a hybrid format. Film industry professionals are invited to come together again in Lisbon (October 21-25) to participate in onsite activities. Online activities will be extended until 31 October through Nebulae’s digital platform.
“From the 21st to the 31st of October, the whole world fits into Lisbon,” festival organisers underline.
