doclisboa 2007

programme > october 18

programme day-by-day

18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28

october 18 - thursday

18 Oct. 19.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
28 Oct. 11.00 - Cinema São Jorge (Room 1)
Taxi to the Dark Side
Alex Gibney
105´ USA 2007

During the “war on terror”, 104 prisoners have died in suspicious circumstances in U.S. custody. "Taxi to the Dark Side" takes an in-depth look at one case: an Afghan taxi driver called Dilawar, who died as a direct result of beatings he sustained from guards and interrogators at Bagram Air Force Base. The documentary carefully develops the last weeks of Dilawar's life and shows how decisions taken at the pinnacle of power in the Bush Administration led directly to Dilawar's brutal death. This is the definitive exploration of the introduction of torture as an interrogation technique in U.S. facilities, and the role played by key figures of the Bush Administration in the process.

18 Oct. 22.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
20 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Enemies of happiness [VN]
Eva Mulvad
58´ Denmark 2006

Malalai Joya is a 28 year-old woman from Afghanistan. The film follows her parliamentary campaign to her election as a delegate in Wolesi Jirga, or National Assembly. It is the first democratic parliament election in Afghanistan in over 30 years. Surrounded by security, Malalai Joya spreads her political beliefs despite several death threats and the previous four attempts against her life. In 2003 Malalai Joya challenged former Mujahidin leaders (Warlords), who according to her, attempt to maintain power through the new system. Her comments ignited outrage among the hard-liners who demanded that she be immediately removed from the sessions. Co-directed by Anja Al-Erhayem.

18 Oct. 22.00 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Zoo [RE]
Dan Berger
75´ USA 2006

In the predawn hours of July 2, 2005, a dying man was dropped off at a rural emergency room in the Pacific Northwest. The man's cause of death was a perforated colon. The investigation led the police to a nearby horse farm, where they found hundreds of hours of videotape of men from all over the world having sex with Arabian stallions. Although this incident made headlines and the tabloid news, Zoo is the complete antithesis of what you expect. The cinematic language invented for the film permits us to examine where we draw the line, how much perversity we can tolerate in others. In a broader sense, Zoo is really about thresholds. What can we stand to know, and, more importantly, what can we stand to accept?

26 Oct. 20.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
18 Oct. 18.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
East of Paradise
Lech Kowalski
105´ France 2005

At the beginning of World War II, Maria Werla was captured in Poland and deported to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. Maria’s struggle for survival had a profound influence on her son Lech Kowalski, who grew up in the United States in close association with the underground culture of the 70s and 80s. In “East of Paradise” both mother and son – one before the camera, and the other with sequences of his past films – tell the story of their lives: two stories of sadness and rage which become one, an intense tale of universal significance.

26 Oct. 16.15 – Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
18 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
My Body [VN]
Margreth Olin
26´ Norway 2002

In this “naked self-portrait”, the filmmaker literally strips naked in front of the camera, wanting to tell the story of being her self. What and who shaped the woman she has become, her identity and how she sees herself? In all her personal revelations she has managed to turn the story of herself into a film that in all its privacy is first and foremost breathtakingly universal. She uses herself as a mirror, a window into relations and events and experiences that give insight, warmth, recognition and appreciation during the clearly tragic and hilarious revelations concerning the factors that formed a life.

26 Oct. 16.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
18 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
All about my father [VN]
Even Benestad
71´ Norway/Denmark 2002

"All about my father" is a personal documentary about a well-respected doctor and transvestite in a small religious town, directed by the one person most likely to convey his story with warmth, humour and irony: his son. Armed with a small video camera, and with the use of old nostalgic Super-8 and 16mm archive family footage, he set out to make a film about his transvestite father that, when he came out of the closet, became a media celebrity in Norway.

22 Oct. 18.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
18 Oct. 23.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Family [VN]
Sami Martin Saif and Phie Ambo
91´ Denmark 2001

Sami’s mother was abandoned by her Yemeni husband, single-handedly raised her children in a Copenhagen slum and turned to alcoholism; his adored older brother committed suicide out of helpless despair. Sami, now a movie director, decides to make sense of his squalid upbringing by tracking down his father. Together with his Danish girlfriend, they make a film about the process. As bitterness and trepidation give way to a more dispassionate attempt at understanding, Sami begins to revel in the joy of rediscovering his extended family. A deftly shot, moving and candid account of one man's often reluctant journey back to his origins

19 Oct. 14.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
18 Oct. 18.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Their Frozen Dream [VN]
Jan Troell
60´ Sweden, 1997

After the Oscar-nominated fiction feature “Flight of the Eagle” (1982) – the story of three Swedish explorators that tried to reach the North Pole in a balloon) – director Jan Troell returned to the same subject in the documentary “Their Fozen Dream”. Narrated by Max von Sydow, this film is based on the authentic documents (letter, photographs and personal journals) found between the remains of the ill-fated expedition, discovered in 1930 on an island in the Artic Ocean in 1930 after 32 years buried in the ice.

23 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
18 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Cherkasy [CI]
Raúl Bartolomé Estebaranz
11´ Spain 2006

“Cherkasy” is a silent visit/film (what we see took place during just one morning) to the corridors and rooms of a Ukrainian orphanage, located just a few miles away from Chernobyl.

23 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
18 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Artel [CI]
Sergei Loznitsa
20´ Russia 2006

In “Artel”, we follow a group of small black silhouettes on a wide white landscape with a couple of log cabins. Beneath the snow and ice they are walking on, fish are swimming. The documentary seems to say that life by the sea has always looked like this and it always will.

23 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
18 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Scythian Suite [CI]
Alexander Gutman
26´ Russia 2006

Nikolai Chukrov – the main character in this impressive and original account of the oppression and inhumane actions of a dictatorship – is a man without a past or a future. He was born in a gulag and still lives in an area where former concentration camps were located under Stalin's regime and which the Russian government would prefer to keep quiet about even after the fall of communism. Director Alexander Gutman links this personal story with the preparation of a concert by Sergei Prokofiev, who died in neglect on the same day as Stalin. The final strand of the story consists of unique weekly newsreels showing the construction of penal camps. Thanks to the combination of storylines, this short film is a cogent commentary on Russia's past and present whilst also having the scope to compare these two eras.

23 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
18 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
1937 [CI]
Nora Martirosyan
44´ Armenia/France 2007

What are the parallels between the history of a country and the history of an individual that lives the history of the country? Two chapters, two time periods, one story. On one hand, 1937, at the height of the Stalinist purges in Yereva, in the then Soviet Armenia, the year of the arrest of Nora Dabagian's father for political reasons. On the other hand, 2006, the circumstantial story of this arrest related by the old woman, affectionately called Baboulia, who was a young girl in the 1930s.

23 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
18 Oct. 22.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Winners and Losers
Lech Kowalski
80´ USA/France 2007

The final Italy versus France match in the 2006 football world cup, which received enormous media coverage due to Zidane’s head butting of Matarazzi, is filmed in Lech Kowalski’s latest documentary in a very personal style, without ever showing the players, focusing on those protagonists who are invisible yet indispensable to the success of such an event: the supporters.

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