How much can a festival achieve?

doclisboa is a festival with a short history. Its first edition took place in 2002 at the CCB and follows on directly from a decade of Encontros Internacionais de Cinema Documental at the Malaposta Cultural Centre (1989-2001). However, the team running the festival this year is making its debut.

We believe that doclisboa 2004 will be valued for the strengths it brings: important films never before seen in Portugal, debates and informal encounters, guests deserving our utmost attention, a week of celebration.

However, we also believe that doclisboa will have an even greater value if it can take advantage of the current surge in interest in documentaries throughout the world. If it can play its part in changing the situation here in Portugal, in the financing of films (ICAM, television, private funding), in the policy of cinema distribution and exhibition and, most importantly, in deepening every festival viewer’s relationship with the documentary genre.

This doclisboa is about constructive opposition. We know that the current cultural choice on offer is weak, we know that the political institutions responsible for overseeing the quality of this choice are not doing their jobs. This is why, over one week, we are going to show what we would regularly like to see in cinemas and on prime time television.

Doclisboa is divided into sections, each one with specific functions.

International competition
will be screening a series of international award-winning films that have not been talked about or shown in Portugal (because they were ignored both by the distributors and the television stations).

Where is the Portuguese documentary going? questions recent national production, its creative capacity, its means of production and the paths open to it in the future.

The section How to understand the Middle East? allows a deeper reflection on an issue that is dealt with on a daily basis by the news, but always superficially. This is a group of films that are important precisely because they show what the documentary as a genre can do.

Focus on Spain, besides bringing to Lisbon a selection of films which have just been launched in cinemas in neighbouring Spain (an example which we would like to see followed in Portugal), this is one more illustration of the potential of the documentary to enlighten and reflect on the identity of a country.

Finally, the Special Sessions, in which one of the highlights is the master class led by Nicolas Philibert. They define the festival’s desire to communicate with the public, in particular with a generation of students who deserve to have access to works of quality.

In short, each doclisboa film shows that there are other forms of creating, of taking part in society, of dealing with institutional powers and, as is clear, other forms of making television and programming cinema.