doclisboa 2007

programme > october 23

programme day-by-day

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

october 23 - tuesday

23 Oct. 14.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
El Caso Pinochet [SE]
Patricio Guzmán
108´ France/Spain/Belgium/Chile 2001

In September 1973, general Augusto Pinochet organised a military coup with the veiled support of the United States. Allende was assassinated and Pinochet installed a bloody dictatorship that would last more than 25 years. Shortly after the dictator finally stepped down, a young Spanish attorney discovered a law that allowed Pinochet to stand trial. A long judicial case initiated then, first in Spain, and later in Britain, where the general was imprisoned, and later in Chile. The trial became a complex chess game of international law and political strategy, but still it was able to restore the hope of the family members of Pinochet regime’s thousands of victims.

23 Oct. 16.45 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
19 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
As operações SAAL [P]
João Dias
90´ Portugal 2007

The Local Ambulatory Support Service (SAAL) was created in 1974 by architect Nuno Portas when he was the I Provisional Government’s Housing and Urbanism Secretary of State. SAAL’s objective was to assist poorly housed populations to rebuild or convert their own neighbourhoods using mainly their own material and financial resources. Portuguese architecture after the 1974 revolution is SAAL – a unique movement in the history of architecture that served as an exemple to many other projects worldwide.

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.

23 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Her Name is 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.

23 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
18 Oct. 21.00 - 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. 21.00 - 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

"The Scythian Suite" é a história de Nikolai Chukrov, um homem sem passado nem futuro. Nikolai nasceu num gulag e ainda hoje vive na zona onde se concentrava a maior parte daqueles campos de trabalho do tempo de Estaline. O realizador liga a biografia de Nikolai à história da preparação de um concerto onde seria tocada a "Suite Cita" de Sergei Prokofiev, que morreu no mesmo dia que Estaline, e ainda a um conjunto de imagens de arquivo mostrando a construção dos campos.

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. 16.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Trying to Kiss the Moon [DF]
Stephen Dwoskin
95´ UK 1994

Stephen Dwoskin was born in New York in 1939. He connected with the Greenwich Village artistic scene, where he met, among others, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and Maya Deren. Influenced by the work of Jack Smith and Ron Rice, he participated in the underground American movement between 1959 and 1964, when he moved to London. His recent films are a meditation on voyeurism and confinement, reflecting his own experience of paralysis resulting from polio when he was very young. “Trying to Kiss the Moon” is an autobiographic film that combines footage shot by his father in New York in the 1940’s with Dwoskin’s own material, mostly from the 1960’.

23 Oct. 18.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
19 Oct. 16.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Cool & Crazy [VN]
Knut Erik Jensen
105´ Norway 2001

With “Cool and Crazy” one of Norway's most experienced and renowned feature film directors is bringing to the screen a world he knows and loves. And he does it in the spirit of the people he portrays, with irreverence and wit and highly charged. For some this will be a film about men. For others it will be about love. Or politics. Or fish. Above all it is about the dignity of ordinary lives lived under extreme circumstances.

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.

23 Oct. 22.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de Décembre [DF]
Jean-Luc Godard
55´ France/Switzerland 1994

Godard presents us with the record of a specific moment in his lifetime, made up of fixed shots of the snowy banks of lake Léman and of the interior of his house, haunted by the filmmaker’s silhouette. Not a portrait for the eternity, not a detailed biography or an artistic testament. No, just some clues and random remarks that follow the author’s interests through images (the blank pages on a notebook, turned one after the other and containing, each one, a phrase, a nostalgic souvenir, a critical recommendation) and through the soundtrack where two voices are interwoven – the director’s and the actor’s voice.

23 Oct. 22.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
David Holzman's Diary [DF]
Jim McBride
74´ USA 1967

Presenting itself as the diary of a film student who decides to make a documentary about the “ordinary man’s life”, “David Holzman’s Diary” is a hilarious satire to “cinéma vérité” American and French films of the 1960’s. Holzman films everybody and everyone around him, from his own TV set to his girlfriend and to random people on the street. Holzman gets so carried away by his project that he’s eventually victim of aggressions and even manages to loose his girlfriend, tired of having the camera sneak on her when she least expects it. Jim McBride’s film is as hilarious as it is effective as many audiences took it for a real documentary when it was first released in 1967.

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. 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.

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…

20 Oct. 18.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
23 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Nocturne [RE]
João Nisa
27´ Portugal 2007

A fragmentary description of the abandoned area of Lisbon`s Luna Park, in the period between its closing down and ultimate demolition. A set of long static takes, punctuated by small movements, depicts some of the precinct`s features (sealed or half-dilapidated façades, partially dismantled attractions), retracing a route within the premises. Intended to force the focus of perception, the film explores the links between temporal experience and the visual and aural grasp of a specific place.

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."

26 Oct. 21.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
23 Oct. 23.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Hot House [CI]
Shimon Dotan
90´ Israel 2006

Nearly 10.000 Palestinians are incarcerated in Israel today. Most Israelis regard these "security prisoners" as murderers and criminals. To the Palestinians, however, they are freedom fighters, heroes, and martyrs in the making. Granted extraordinary access to the highest-security institutions, renowned filmmaker Shimon Dotan uncovers a startling truth: Israeli prisons have become a breeding ground for the next generation of Palestinian leaders and a hotbed for “terrorist” plots.

La petite fille et le chien vont au bal de la reine [P]

24 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
23 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
The Little Girl and the Dog Go the Queen's Ball [P]
Ana Margarida Fernandes Gil
18´ Portugal 2007

My four-year-old niece asked me a question. "Why do you want to make films, auntie?" I didn't know how to answer. She decided, then, to make a request. I took her seriously. And I entered a journey of discovery of small worlds, real and imaginary, looking for an answer.

24 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
23 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Jardim [P]
João Vladimiro
75´ Portugal 2007

I know that the trees don’t have eyes, that the water doesn’t have a mouth, and that stones don’t have ears. Still, we communicate. In this particular garden, long mute talks take place, like the two elders that, through their sheer presence, talk to each other about calmness, confort and sadness. Here, I witnessed the first steps of a child, the arrival of a mute duck and the falling leaves of the white poplar… (João Vladimiro)

24 Oct. 16.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
23 Oct. 16.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Betrayed Women [making of] [P]
Miguel Marques
54´ Portugal 2007

Maria José Silva is a unique figure of contemporary Portuguese culture: she’s a director, a writer, an actress and a singer, and she has been making amateur cinema for twenty years in Oporto, where she lives. This documentary joins her during the shooting of her latest film, “Mulheres Traídas”, a film about infidelity seen from a feminine perspective, and a meditation on the way fiction can mirror a social reality.

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.

19 Oct. 14.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
23 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
El Ejido, The Law of Profit [I]
Jawad Rhalib
80´ Belgium 2006

Today, the formerly-deserted region of Almeria in southern Spain produces one third of Europe’s winter consumption of fruits and vegetables and reaps two thirds of the country’s farm profits. This ‘economic miracle’ in a greenhouse relies on the labour of nearly 80.000 immigrants, half of whom do not have proper working papers. In a destroyed environment where the air is vitiated by pesticides and ground water is running out, the village of El Ejido illustrates, almost to the point of caricature, this industrial exploitation of men and the land encouraged by globalisation. The workers stay in chabolas, small constructions made of cardboard and plastic, without water or electricity. Near-slavery that fills our plates…

25 Oct. 14.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
23 Oct. 22.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
The halfmoon files [I]
Philip Scheffner
87´ Germany 2007

The phonograph recordings produced at the Halfmoon Camp were the result of a unique alliance between the military, the scientific community and the entertainment industry. Like a memory game, Philip Scheffner’s film uncovers pictures and sounds that revive the ghosts of the past. Those who pressed the record button on the phonographs, on photo and film cameras, were the ones to write official history. Mall Singh and the other prisoners of war of the Halfmoon Camp disappeared from history. Their spirits and ghostly appearances seem to play with the filmmaker, to ambush him. They pursue him on his path, to bring their voices back to their home countries. Yet the story of these ghosts escapes the control of the narrator. And the ghosts do not disperse.

top