doclisboa 2007

programme > october 22

programme day-by-day

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

october 22 - monday

22 Oct. 10.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
State Legislature [SE]
Frederick Wiseman
217´ USA 2007

“State Legislature” shows the day-to-day activities of the Idaho Legislature, including committee meetings, debates of the House and Senate, informal discussions, meetings with lobbyists, constituents, the public and the press. The workings of a democratic government are not of interest solely to Americans, but, because so many countries in the world are currently trying to adopt a democratic form of government, the issues presented have relevance on a global scale. The film is an example of the achievements, values, constraints and limitations of the democratic process.

22 Oct. 14.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Alguna Tristeza [CI]
Juan Alejandro Ramírez
41´ Peru 2006

“Some Kind of Sadness” is a lyrical meditation on an assortment of social, and psychological, conditions in contemporary Peru. Ramirez brackets the work with images of the unhappy faces of mixed-race Peruvian football players who defeated Austria in overtime in the 1936 Berlin Olympics—only to have the game annulled in an overtly racist decision. The proud athletes left rather than submit to a rematch. The photographs are a point of departure for Ramirez to explore a culture and an economy that has made sadness a way of life for his countrymen.

22 Oct. 14.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
It's always late for freedom [CI]
Mehrdad Oskouei
52´ Iran 2006

Through a fine portrait of four teenagers detained in a reformatory in Teheran, Mehrdad Oskouei depicts the profound distress experienced by a lost generation undermined by the serious socio-economic problems affecting Iranian society. The reasons for sentencing these teenage boys who have hardly left childhood are alarming – consumption of hard drugs, assault and battery, theft, possession of false identification papers. A striking portrait of a wounded childhood.

22 Oct. 16.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Monte Gordo's Beach [P]
Sofia Trincão and Óscar Clemente
30´ Portugal 2006

On the beach at Monte Gordo (Algarve, Portugal) in the shadow of holiday apartment buildings, a small fishing community still persists. This documentary records the activities at the beach during a full year, from a lonely winter beach, to the busy summer with the beach full of sun shades. Through the voices of those who live from the sea, we see the changes that this last generation of Portuguese fishermen are undergoing. We go fishing with “God Protects Me” the last traditional wooden boat used on this beach. “People come to the beach and say – Oh… the fresh fish from Monte Gordo! …But the fishing boats …where are they?!…Not a single one! – They are marketing things that disappeared years ago!” says a fisherman.

22 Oct. 16.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
People of the Sea [P]
Dânia Filipa Ferreira Lucas
33´ Portugal 2006

Surrounded by troubled waters, but never doubting their faith, the “people of the sea” struggle for each man’s survival, hoping that tomorrow will again bring them their daily bread. Dividing their time between their home and their boat, they are absent husbands and fathers, who are afraid, and have trouble expressing themselves. With silent and focussed gazes, they define the sea as a mysterious force. They wrinkle and observe the bow breaking the majestic waves, raising their harsh hands to ask the Virgin Mary’s protection.

22 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
23 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
The Boater's House [P]
Jorge Murteira
63´ Portugal 2007

"Paulino lives in an improvised schack over the river where he stores all his belongings, where he cooks, shaves and takes cover when it rains or when it´s colder or windier. All he asks is a new and proper house. He connects the two banks of Tejo. The film joins Amieira do Tejo´s last boater for four seasons. In winter and fall, near the fire by the river, waiting for the trains that only seldom bring any customers. In spring and summer, over a table, lonely, sharing a drink or a snack with whoever passes by. Until a passenger gets of the train and asks him to cross the river. Today, there´s no more boater and the new house is yet to be built. No one can cross the river any more."

22 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
20 Oct. 16.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Le Papier ne Peut pas Envelopper la Braise [SE]
Rithy Panh
86´ France 2006

Rithy Panh’s most recent film listens to the prostitutes living in the “white building” in downtown Phnom Penh. For the Cambodian director, the most telling sign of the social collapse of a country torn by decades of war is the way the bodies of those who have nothing are economically and politically exploited: the dead soldiers leave behind children in underpaid jobs, or worst, in prostitution. “Le Papier ne Peut pas Envelopper la Braise” doesn’t show us characters, but people. Rithy Panh makes use of film to counter the objectification of those people’s bodies and to allow their own voices to claim humanity and an individuality otherwise denied in their daily lives.

22 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 18.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
A Father's Music [CI]
Igor Heitzmann
105´ Germany 2007

Shortly after the Wall came down, the Austrian conductor Otmar Suitner ended his long-standing career at the State Opera in East Berlin. Parkinson syndrome was causing his hands to tremble. A conductor who had achieved world fame at Bayreuth could not control the baton. Music disappeared from his daily life. But the fall of the Wall brought something new: changes to his family life. For decades Suitner had two private lives, one with his wife in East Berlin, the other one with his mistress and their son, Igor, in the west of the divided city. In “A Father's Music” Igor Heitzmann tells the story of a rapprochement: with his father, the distant conductor; with a vanished country, the German Democratic Republic; with the exceptional paths of his parents’ lives; and with music.

22 Oct. 14.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Le Filmeur [DF]
Alain Cavalier
97´ France 2005

Alain Cavalier’s personal style begins to take shape in “Le Plein de Super” (1976) and “Martin et Léa” (1978), where he appropriates the biographies of his actors for narrative purposes. He first focused on his own biography in “Ce Répondeur Ne Prend Pas de Méssages” (1978) and, after “Vies” (2000), he started working alone using a small DV Camera. “Le Filmeur”, his most recent film and his third auto-biographical work, condenses 11 years of daily shootings (1994-2005) in a filmed diary 101’ long where, for the first time, the director’s face is shown.

22 Oct. 16.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
23 Oct. 18.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Carla’s List [I]
Marcel Schupbach
95´ Switzerland 2006

Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a woman is fighting to get the last fugitive war criminals under arrest. They are called Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic, and Ante Gotovina. Her name is Carla Del Ponte. For the very first time, a camera has been allowed behind the scenes of the ICTY, and follows day by day the work of the Attorney General and his team. The journey brings us from The Hague to New York, from Belgrade to Washington, Zagreb or Luxemburg, in a thrilling atmosphere of manhunt, gambling and risk. We follow her quest between truth and lies, between success and deceived hopes, fake news, and lobbying.

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.

22 Oct. 20.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
23 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Abandoned [CI]
Joan Soler
25´ Spain 2006

Many children live on the city’s streets of Roumania’s capital. This is the story about some children living rough in the sewerage system in front of the North Railway station of Bucarest. They are “aurolac’s”, so called because of their addiction to synthetic paints of this brand.

22 Oct. 20.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
23 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
In the North [CI]
Chen Lei
62´ China 2006

This is a story about a man named Zhen, a former drug addict. Frail as he was, drug had dominated him for ten years. Yet, his tenacity finally drove him to alter the situation. In 2001, he left Shanghai, a metropolis and his hometown, getting reclusive in a remote mountain area in north China. He recovered his dignity and found his love again. Hua, a country girl, married Zhen despite her parents’ disapproval and brought him a daughter. Zhen’s parents hoped they would come back to Shanghai but Zhen is reluctant to leave. Soon the news came that his father got seriously sick, depressing him again...

22 Oct. 22.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
La Pudeur et l'Impudeur [DF]
Hervé Guibert
58´ France 1991

Writer Hervé Guibert, an AIDS terminal patient, films his daily routines during the last months of his life. Having provoked a huge public debate after it was broadcasted by the French television channel that co-produced it, this intimate filmed journal shows the progressive decay of a “medicalized” body that the director recognizes less and less as his own. A film conceived and shot like an exclamation and a shout that has no other reason than the intense pain that generates it.

22 Oct. 22.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Glitterbug [DF]
Derek Jarman
60` UK 1994

“Glitterbug”, British filmmaker Derek Jarman's last film, consists of film strips shot with his Super-8 camera between 1971 and 1986. Images from Jarman's own everyday life in London in the early 70's, with rooms filled with anti-cultural fetishes from the Swinging London era, are mixed with various documentaries from the making of some of Jarman's notorious successes: “Sebastiane” (1976) and the punk protest “Jubilee” (1977). Always accompanied by Brian Eno's expressive synthesizer loops, “Glitterbug” seems to be a perfect symbiosis of a bygone era, the early seventies with its bold mixture of styles and elements of camp.

23 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Elle s´appelle Sabine [CI]
Sandrine Bonnaire
85´ France 2007

Sandrine Bonnaire’s sister, 38-year-old Sabine, is autistic. For her first film as a director, the actress put together 25 years of personal footage (family photos, travel films, etc.) and reveals the endearing personality of her sister, whose talents were crushed by the failings of the care system. Loving but uncompromising and devoid of pathos, the film straightforwardly shows how the life of this once beautiful young woman was destroyed and how she has to get over years of deficient care.

25 Oct. 16.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
22 Oct. 16.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
5-7 rue Corbeau [I]
Thomas Pendzel
59´ France 2007

From the outside it was a normal building. 168 one-room dwellings, inhabited by newly arrived immigrants to Paris. Mid-nineteenth century tenants were rural French, followed by Belgians, Italians, Eastern European Jews, Spaniards, Portuguese, and repatriates, North Africans, Senegalese and finally Malians. By 1998 the building had become the largest slum house in Paris. Its 350 occupants blocked the street four months with a protesting camp; the rundown tenement was bought and torn-down by city authorities. “5-7 rue Corbeau” sets out to observe a bounded microcosm, but it ultimately provides the foundations for further reflection on urban life, city dwellings, exile and the eventuality of turning a film into a space of memory.

20 Oct. 23.15 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 18.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
The first day [CI]
Marcin Sauter
20´ Poland 2007

It's a story about one of the most important moments in everybody's life, the first day in school; the first border young people have to cross to become adults. In this case, it’s an intern school where children from the tundra, used to living in tents, and in close contact with a wild nature, move to a urban environment where they discover that they too are part of a huge multinational country, Russia, with a national anthem they learn to sing by heart, and which is led by a great president named Putin.

20 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 18.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Santiago [CI]
João Moreira Sales
80´ Brazil 2007

“Santiago” is a documentary about the failure of a film. It was shot in 1992, but the director could not edit it at the time. In 2005 the director returned to the footage, in search of a reason for his false start. Santiago had served as butler in the house where he grew up and was a man of vast culture and a prodigious memory, whose idiosyncrasies left a profound mark on the family’s memories. Reflecting on the past time, the narrator closes in on the film’s secret. “Santiago” is a film on identity, memory, and the very nature of documentary.

26 Oct. 14.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
The days and the hours [CI]
John Haptas e Kristine Samuelson
8´ USA 2006

“The Days and the Hours” is an intimate view of an unlikely sanctuary in a hard world. At a St. Boniface Church in the middle of San Francisco, homeless people are allowed to sleep in the pews in the midst of daily services. Filling row after row, over a hundred exhausted men and women find relief from sidewalks and city shelters.

26 Oct. 14.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Kamp Katrina [CI]
David Redmon e Ashley Sabin
74´ USA 2006

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Ms. Pearl offers shelter to fourteen displaced individuals by setting up a self-made tent community in her backyard. Confronted with limited resources, no housing and no governmental support, Ms. Pearl and her husband attempt to create a community for the residents while they work to rebuild homes and businesses destroyed by the storm. The situation gradually goes awry and she is confronted with an array of abuses amidst a broken city.

19 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 23.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
The Two Faces of War [I]
Diana Andringa e Flora Gomes
100´ Portugal 2007

Liberation war to some, Africa war to others, the conflict that opposed the PAIGC to the Portuguese troops between 1963 and 1974 is described differently in the two countries’ history books. But those aren’t the only “two faces” of this war. Beyond the conflict, there was always some degree of complicity between the two adversaries: “We’re not fighting against the Portuguese people, but against colonialism”, Amilcar Cabral said. And it’s true that many Portuguese were on the PAIGC side. It was no accident that the Captains’ Movement that would lead to the 1974 Revolution was born in Guiné. Again, two faces: the war ends with a doble victory – Guiné’s independence, and the democracy in Portugal.

20 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Era preciso fazer as coisas [P]
Margarida Cardoso
52´ Portugal 2007

Some days in Fall during the rehearsals of “Chekhov’s “Uncle Vania”.The actors and the director are looking for the way to build something together. Their inner voices and their doubts confound with their characters’ own doubts and inner voices. The house, the time, old age, the frustration. Aren’t we all looking for a meaning?

20 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Metamorfoses [P]
Bruno Cabral
48´ Portugal 2007

Tó and Tuxa have been a part of the Crinabel Theatre Company for 20 years. Carolina is much younger and has many ambitions. Nelson has just been selected to star the company’s next production, Kafka’s “Metamorphoses”. The bonds between the member of this unique company are very strong. Everybody has constraints and impediments of some sort. In a very warm atmosphere, the rehearsal begins…

25 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 16.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Arquitectura de peso [P]
Edgar Pêra
24´ Portugal 2007

Following a demand from the first Lisbon Architecture Trienal, director Edgar Pêra latest film shows four important architectural events that “projected” Portugal into Europe: Belém’s Cultural Centre – where 14 years ago Portugal first presided the EEC; Parque das Nações – where Expo 98 took place; (10) Football Stadiums – built for Euro 2004; and Casa da Música – originally designed for Oporto, European Capital of Culture 2001.

25 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 16.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Lisboa dentro [P]
Muriel Jaquerod and Eduardo Saraiva Pereira
56´ Portugal/Switzerland 2007

In the city of Lisbon, ten thousand buildings are dilapidated according to the authorities. Six hundred and fifty renovation projects are going on these days. Working for the City or the newly created Urban Rehabilitation Companies, architects, jurists, social workers visit the apartments and meet with the owners, tenants and promoters. Within the buildings the film captures the confrontation of these different worlds. Cities are made of people and they have their own stories, their own things to tell.

24 Oct. 16.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
22 Oct. 18.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
American Fugitive: The Truth About Hassan [I]
Jean-Daniel Lafond
75´ Canada 2006

When in 2001 Iranian director Mohsen Makmalbaf’s feature film “Kandahar” was acclaimed in Cannes and shown around the world, the international press picked up on a surprising appearance. The film’s African-American “doctor” was in fact a man called David Belfield, wanted in the United States for murder, and now living in exile in Iran. In Washington D.C. in the summer of 1980, at the behest of Iranian intelligence, an African-American named David Belfield shot dead Ali Akbar Tabatabai, the former press attaché and representative of the Shah at the Iranian embassy. Tabatabai was thought to be involved in a plot to kill the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and topple the new regime.

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.

19 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 22.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
My 9/11 [CI]
Tjebbo Penning
11´ USA/Holland 2006

On my laptop (after the kids were in bed), next to the window from which I saw it all happen, I made a little film in a way that was completely new to me; no budget, no crew, no pressure. The video images of the WTC on 9/11 were shot by a neighbor, Andrea Star Reese, who had more or less the same view on the towers. She shot what I remember seeing, and was so very kind to let me use the material.

19 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 22.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Jesus Camp [CI]
Heidi Ewing
85´ USA 2006

A growing number of Evangelical Christians believe there is a revival underway in America whereby Christian youth must take up the leadership of the religious right. “Jesus Camp” follows Levi, Rachael, Tory and a number of other young children to Pastor Becky Fischer's "Kids on Fire" summer camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota, where kids as young as 6 years-old are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in "God's army." The film follows these children at camp as they hone their "prophetic gifts" and are schooled in how to "take back America for Christ." The film is a first-ever look into an intense training ground that recruits born-again Christian children to become an active part of America's political future.

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