doclisboa 2007

programme > october 21

programme day-by-day

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

october 21 - sunday

21 Oct. 14.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
23 Oct. 16.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir [CI]
Wang Bing
184´ China 2007

Winter in China. A town in the snow. Night is falling. Wrapped in her red coat, an old woman walks slowly through a housing complex to her simple apartment. Inside, Fengming settles into her armchair and remembers. Her memories take us back to 1949 – to the beginning of a journey that will take us through 30 years of her life and of the New China…

21 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Goodbye, Until Tomorrow [P]
António Escudeiro
60´ Portugal 2007

António Escudeiro was born and raised in Angola, where he worked until the day he was forced to leave against his will. He swore to go back. But his return only took place 32 years later. “Goodbye, Until Tomorrow” is the documentary he shot about his return. Two different visual universes confront each other in this film: the director’s memories, and present day Angola. Different times and encounters. Some never before imagined. For 25 days, Escudeiro travels through his Angolan personal geography – Lobito, Huambo, Huíla. To find out what he already knew to start with: that Angola is his homeland, that Africa is his continent.

21 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
Sicko [SE]
Michael Moore
74´ USA 2007

After tackling topics like US gun violence in 2002 and President George W. Bush in 2004, this time the filmmaker investigates the flaws in the American health care system. Fifty million people are locked out, because they cannot afford to pay private insurance. The film probes a complex system and points out that even patients who are members of HMOs, and thus insured to some degree, may not receive adequate care, because the top priority of these medical insurance companies is their own profit. They'll do anything to avoid spending a lot of money.

21 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 16.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Umbrella [CI]
Du Haibin
100´ China 2007

Director Du Haibin uses the umbrella, always present because of China’s adverse climate, as a metaphor for the sense of unprotection Chinese workers are presently experiencing. The design for modernization is all geared towards benefiting the cities, while sacrificing interests of the countryside. The 20 years of reform in fact marginalized rural society. Although the government made gestures to assist the countryside, China has become a place where a huge wealth gap exists between a few rich people, and a growing number of poor.

21 Oct. 14.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Notes on Marie Menken [RE]
Martina Kudlacek
67´ Áustria/USA 2006

This film explores the almost forgotten story of the legendary artist Marie Menken (1909-1970) who became one of New York’s outstanding underground experimental filmmakers of the Fifties and Sixties, inspiring artists such as Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Kenneth Anger. The inspiring muse of Edward Albee’s novel “Who’s Afraid of Virgina Wolf”, Menken was a unique figure in New York’s artistic scene in the Sixties, having directed dozens of films and participated in some of Warhol’s own movies. With original music by John Zorn, Martina Kudláček’s documentary presents never-before-seen footage by Marie Menken salvaged from basements and storage vaults, including a camera "duel" for Bolexes between Menken and Andy Warhol.

21 Oct. 16.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Elegy of Life: Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya [SE]
Aleksandr Sokurov
110´ Russia 2006

In this "elegy," the Russian director Alexander Sokurov portrays the most famous couple in Russian classical music: 80-year-old opera singer Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya and 79-year-old cellist, pianist and conductor Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich. He interviews them in their beautiful, classically furnished house about their relationships with composer friends like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and about their ideas on classical music and the changing times. Using pictures and archive footage that he has incorporated with split-screens, slow wipes and insets, Sokurov recapitulates their life and career. He recalls their expulsion from the Soviet Union after they had put up the dissident author Solzhenitsyn.

Compilation, 12 Instants d'Amour non Partagé [DF]

21 Oct. 18.15 – Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Compilation, 12 Instants d'Amour non Partagé [RE]
Frank Beauvais
40´ France 2007

When Frank Beauvais met Arno he fell in love with him. To be sure he'd see him again Frank asked him to take part in the project that eventually led to this film: every day for three months, Frank asked Arno to come to his house to listen to music. This music was to become the sole form of dialogue between the two men, telling Arno about Frank’s feelings, teasing him, soothing him, pushing him...

21 Oct. 18.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
To His Apartments [RE]
Jean-Claude Rousseau
70´ France 2007

The winner of the Marseille International Documentary Film Festival 2007, Jean-Claude Rousseau’s last film makes literal use of Racine’s Bérénice (1670) dramatic principle: “to create a drama with the simplicity of action which the Ancients so favoured”. Also close to the simplicity that characterises Rousseau’s work, “De Son Appartement” shows the director alone in his house, reading aloud scenes from Bérénice while performing his daily shores.

21 Oct. 20.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
24 Oct. 22.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Ironeaters [CI]
Shaheen Dill-Riaz's
85´ Germany 2007

The playground of director Shaheen Dill-Riaz's youth was the erstwhile white beaches of Chittagong in Bangladesh. Today the area is a graveyard for ships where thousands of workers, his old friends included, work on the wrecks with primitive tools, salvaging raw materials. "When you are hungry, you can eat anything", says Karim, the director's former schoolmate, "even when it is iron." While the Western media report of the destruction of the environment and dangerous working conditions, for the so-called '”iron-eaters” the most important thing is to survive.

21 Oct. 22.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
19 Oct. 18.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Ghosts of Cité Soleil [VN]
Asger Leth and Milos Loncarevic
88´ Denmark 2007

Two brothers are stuck in a system of political violence. They are gangleaders in President Aristide’s secret army of slum gangs. One wants to fight for the president, the other wants out. They live in Cité Soleil, the most dangerous place on earth. A film about Haiti, where gangs, gun rappings, love and dramatic, political events, together, tell the true story of the last months of Aristide’s presidency.

24 Oct. 23.15 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
At the datcha [CI]
Thierry Paladino
26´ Poland 2006

A warm portrait of a family spending a weekend outside the city. Despite the minimal comfort at their datcha, their happiness is purely visible. By mixing poetry and the absurd, Thierry Paladino offers entertaining comic situations. A burlesque, bucolic film takes its inspiration from the beginnings of the cinema and gradually reveals the filmmaker’s great tenderness for his characters.

24 Oct. 23.15 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
School Scapes [CI]
David McDougall
77´ Australia 2007

Inspired by the cinema of Lumière and the ideas of the 20th century Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti, MacDougall follows up his films about Doon School in northern India with this film about a famous progressive co-educational boarding school in South India, the Rishi Valley School. Krishnamurti taught that one should learn to observe the world more calmly and clearly. This was also how cinema began, and what excited its first audiences. “SchoolScapes” attempts to recapture the same freshness of observing the world in a series of scenes which each consist of a single shot. It is a film dedicated to the simple act of looking.

20 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 16.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Retour en Normandie [CI]
Nicolas Philibert
109´ France 2006

In 1975, Nicolas Philibert, who was then 24 years old, worked as assistant director in René Allio’s film “Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère…”. Shot on location in Normandy, the film adapted Michel Foucault’s book with the same title and it used almost exclusively non-professional actors, selected from the region’s inhabitants, to recreate the triple homicide that had taken place there 140 years before. Thirty years later, the director of “Être et Avoir” returned to the shooting location of his master’s film, searching for its original actors.

25 Oct. 16.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 18.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
In the House of Angels [VN]
Margreth Olin
97´ Norway 1998

“In the House of Angels” explores everyday life in the Sandeheim home for the elderly in Norway. The film provides suggestive insight into an issue rarely dealt with in such a sensible and respectful way. The characters get close to the camera, and once they are alone with the film crew, they use it as an intimate friend to whom they can confess, express their despair, or confide their opinions. This film is a much-needed hymn to old age portrayed with warmth and humour, but it also questions the idea of the Welfare State. Does this seeming inability to incorporate humanity in the daily lives of these people mean that the idea of the welfare state has failed?

Não me Obriguem a Vir para a Rua Gritar [SE]

21 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Don't Make Me Go to the Streets and Shout [SE]
Rui de Brito
61´ Portugal 2007

SubFilmes invited several contemporary artists to create a work specifically to Zeca – a film, a song, a drawing, a motion graphics animation. Therefore, we have a street art collage, a reinterpretation of a Zeca song, or a theatre play. Rádio Macau, Nancy Vieira, Couple Coffee, Vicious 5, Raquel Tavares – in music; the theatre company Primeiros Sintomas; the Daltonic Brothers in videojamming; Target and Mosaik in street art; or the Quebra-Diskos in turntablism.

23 Oct. 20.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
21 Oct. 23.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
D.O.A./Dead on Arrival (A Right of Passage)
Lech Kowalski
90´ USA 1981

This story of the first, controversial American tour of the Sex Pistols in 1978 is at the bottom an analysis of the punk rock movement in the late 70s: performances by the English band from New York to Texas (with Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen who overdosed on drugs in a hotel room, foretelling his tragic destiny), interviews with their fans, detractors and analysts, a look at the English musical scene with performances by punk groups like X-Ray Spex, Terry and the Idiots, Sham 69 and The Rich Kids.

20 Oct. 16.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Convicções [P]
Julie Frères
55´ Portugal/France 2007

In February 2007, the Portuguese were asked to vote on a referendum about the legal status of abortion. Working its way from the daily lives of four women with opposite convictions about this issue, “Convicções” follows the referendum campaign’s backstage, and on the streets and the media.

19 Oct. 16.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 16.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
& etc [P]
Cláudia Clemente
25´ Portugal 2007

Founded in 1973, “& etc” is a small publishing house with unique standards: it’s not profit oriented, it doesn’t publish commercial books and it favours unknown authors. Over the years it has become a reference in the Portuguese publishing world, where it’s both by its carefully designed squared books, and by the unique authors it has published: among many others, director João César Monteiro, and poets Adília Lopes and Alberto Pimenta. In this documentary, two of its directors, Vitor Silva Tavares and Rui Caeiro, remember some of the episodes that have marked three decades of literary adventures.

Poeticamente exausto, verticalmente só [P]

19 Oct. 16.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 16.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Poetically Exhausted, Vertically Alone – The Story of José Bação Leal [P]
Luísa Marinho
56´ Portugal 2007

José Bação Leal was born in 1942 in Portugal and died in Mozambique, during the portuguese colonial war. With only 23 years old he was a promising writer and thinker. Like hundreds of young men of his generation, he died in a war he was against. He left us an impressive artistic testimony of his own human experience.

25 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 18.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Santa Fe Street [CI]
Carmen Castillo
163´ France/Chile/Belgium 2007

October 5, 1974. Chile. Calle Santa Fe, in the Santiago suburbs. Carmen Castillo, 6 months pregnant, is badly injured and her partner Miguel Enriquez, head of the resistance against Pinochet's dictatorship, is killed in combat. So begins “Calle Santa Fe”, a journey into the memories of the defeated, a journey undertaken without self-indulgence or complacency; a narrative driven by the question: Were these acts of resistance worth their terrible cost? Did Miguel die in vain?

24 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
21 Oct. 22.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Cuba, An African Odyssey [I]
Jihan El Tahri
120´ France/UK 2006

Between 1961 and 1989, the African continent was one of the most important theatres of the Cold War. By uniting in a sort of “third bloc” they fought in the name of a new ideal: internationalism – the only weapon available that promised to guarantee national independence. Cuba had a preponderant role in this process by providing aid to young African revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral or Agostinho Neto. From the tragicomic epic of Che Guevara in Congo to the triumph at the battle of Cuito Carnavale in Angola, Cuba, an African odyssey attempts to understand the world today through the saga of these internationalists who won every battle but finally lost the war.

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