The 22nd edition of Doclisboa https://doclisboa.org/2024/en/ will screen 183 films from 55 countries, including 28 world premieres, 19 international premieres and 30 Portuguese films. The International Competition features 12 films from 12 countries and includes five world premieres and six international premieres. The Portuguese Competition presents ten docs of which four are world premieres.
The films “compose a portrait of contemporaneity and humanity, and of what surrounds, impassions and torments them both,” the festival writes of its selection. More than 160 guests will visit Lisbon in October, organisers add.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION FILMS
- [anan] by Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat | Belgium (World Premiere)
- The Anchor by Jen Debauche | Belgium (World Premiere)
- Apparition by Camila Freitas | Brazil (World Premiere – new version)
- Instead of Trees by Philipp Hartmann | Germany, Argentina (World Premiere)
- Fire Supply by Lucía Seles | Argentina (European Premiere)
- A 200 Dinars Note by Lamine Ammar-Khodja | Argelia, France (World Premiere)
- Well Ordered Nature by Eva C. Heldmann | Germany (International Premiere)
- The Wolves by Isabelle Prim | France (International Premiere)
- My Friend Pedro MIXTAPE by Lincoln Péricles | Brazil (International Premiere)
- The Shards by Masha Chernaya | Georgia, Russia (World Premiere)
- Tales from the Source by Léonard Pongo | Belgium, Democratic Republic of Congo (International Premiere)
- Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) by Suneil Sanzgiri | USA, India (International Premiere)
- Blue by Ana Vîjdea | Romania, Belgium, Hungary, Portugal (Portuguese Premiere)
- Sulfur by Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes | Portugal, Brazil (World Premiere)
- Resonance Spiral by Filipa César, Marinho de Pina | Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, Germany (Portuguese Premiere)
- I Am Here by Zsófia Paczolay, Dorian Rivière | Portugal (European Premiere)
- Fire of Wind by Marta Mateus | Portugal, Switzerland, France (Portuguese Premiere)
- At Trafaria by Pedro Florêncio | Portugal (World Premiere)
- The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder by Inadelso Cossa | Mozambique, Germany, France, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway (Portuguese Premiere)
- The Palace of Citizens by Rui Pires | Portugal (World Premiere)
- Unstable Rocks by Ewelina Rosinska | Germany, Portugal (World Premiere)
New Visions
The New Visions section once again presents the latest films by “great cinematic innovators” such as Andrei Ujică, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Radu Jude and Harmony Korine, the festival notes.
TWST – Things We Said Today profiles Andrei Ujică‘s fascination with The Beatles and their trip to New York in 1965 and “the perplexity, past and present, of America’s social landscape.” Radu Jude manifests the playfulness inherent to his cinema once again in Eight Postcards from Utopia, a montage film that collates material from post-socialist advertisements in Romania. Doclisboa also presents the international premiere of a new film by an “essential name” in European cinema: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Now in his 80s, almost three decades after his last film Syberberg returns with Demmin Cantos, a film about Demmin, the town in north-eastern Germany where the director was born and which was the scene of one of the largest mass suicides in the post-WWII period. Syberberg, author of, among many other films, Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), will be present in person at Doclisboa. The festival will also screen Ludwig. Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), as part of the retrospective Back to the Future, curated by Jean-Pierre Rehm.
2024 is the year Augusto M. Seabra’s passing, a key figure in the history of Doclisboa and the New Visions section in particular, and the festival dedicates this edition to him.
In the From the Earth to the Moon section, two restored prints are highlighted: One Is Few, Two Would Fill (1970), a film by Odion Lopes, a pioneer of black cinema; and The Castle of Purity by Mexican Arturo Ripstein. The section also presents Mexican-Canadian Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night, in which the contemporary filmmaker explores new narrative forms.
Elsewhere, the competitive Green Years section continues to occupy a “special place” in Doclisboa’s programme, through the revelation of new talents.
This year Nebulae, the festival’s industry space, presents Spain as its guest country, and the Abcdoc educational project once again emphasises the power of documentaries as an educational tool.
