doclisboa 2007

programme > october 26

programme day-by-day

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

october 26 - friday

26 Oct. 14.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
22 Oct. 21.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
The days and the hours [CI]
John Haptas and 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 and 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.

26 Oct. 16.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 16.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Encounters [P]
Pierre-Marie Goulet
105´ Portugal/France 2006

1957: a group of peasants from Peroguarda, in the Alentejo, travels to sing in Oporto. The poet António Reis, director to be of “Trás-os-Montes”, listens to their chants. Seduced by them, he heads to Peroguarda with a tape recorder. 1959: Michel Giacometti, a musicologist of Corsican ascent, starts a 30-year research. He soon discovers Peroguarda. 1965: in Oporto, young poet Manuel António Pina and other aspiring young poets elect António Reis as their major reference. 1966: filmmaker Paulo Rocha shoots his second feature (“Mudar de Vida”) at Furadouro, setting the film’s plot amidst the fishermen that fascinated him during childhood. These and other people are part of an informal tribe whose members recognize each other when they meet.

26 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Piccolo Lavoro [P]
António Nuno Júnior
18´ Portugal 2006

Director Pedro Costa and his editor work on the editing of a few extras for a DVD edition of his film "Onde Jaz o Teu Sorriso?".

Homens que São como Lugares Mal Situados [P]

26 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Men who Are like Misplaced Places [P]
João Trabulo
21´ Portugal 2007

A man travels between two continents. His eyes take in the memory in an uncertain path.

26 Oct. 18.30 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
24 Oct. 20.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Blind Runner, An Artist Under Surveillance [P]
Luís Alves de Matos
57´ Portugal 2007

In this film an artist is placed under 24-hour surveillance. The continuous flow of images and sounds turns the viewer into an accomplice and a privileged witness of all his movements. We are led to ask ourselves not only why is this chase happening, but also about the meaning and nature of his work. Aren’t we all under surveillance? But who surveils who and what?

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.

26 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
Rostov-Luanda [SE]
Abderrahmane Sissako
60´ Mauritânia 1997

Like so many young Africans, A. Sissako went to the Soviet Union in the 1980s for political and technical training and met an Angolan, Baribanga, whose confidence in his country's future embodied Sissako's own hopes for the continent. Seventeen years later, and having only an old photograph to start with, Sissako sets on a trip across the continent to find his old friend. The trip becomes a reflection about how the wars and all the other catastrophes plaguing Africa have devastated the optimism of Sissako's generation and the dreams they had of changing the face of the continent when he met Baribanga in Rostov.

26 Oct. 23.00 - Culturgest (Large Auditorium)
Outras Frases [SE]
Jorge António
52´ Portugal/Angola 2003

Making use of research and reinterpreting traditional elements, Ana Clara Guerra Marques, an Angolan choreographer and dancer, has been trying over the last twenty years to develop a new aesthetics and a new language for her country’s contemporary dance. Director Jorge António, who worked as the executive producer of the Angolan Contemporary Dance Company between 1995 and 1999, presents us with a documentary about this dancer’s artistic and pedagogical work, with Angola’s recent political and social history always in the background. With, among others, artist António Ole, and writers Luandino Vieira and José Eduardo Agualusa.

26 Oct. 11.00 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
20 Oct. 18.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
Sin - A Documentary on Daily Offences [VN]
Virpi Suutari and Susanna Helke
36´ Finland 1996

“Sin” is based on the traditional seven deadly sins. The material for the film was gathered through campaigns in the press. Hundreds of people answered ads placed in newspapers, describing their personal experiences of sin. The people who appear in the film were selected from among the respondents. “Sin” employs the same cinematographic and documentary method used by the team Helke and Suutari in their previous documentaries. Instead of traditional interviews, the film consists of confessions made point blank to the camera. As in ther previous films, the team approaches the subject through trivialities. Their aim is not to discover grand themes, but to record the history of the common man.

26 Oct. 11.00 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
20 Oct. 18.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 2)
The Idle Ones [VN]
Virpi Suutari and Susanna Helke
81´ Finland 2001

Covering a period of 18 months, the film follows the activities of a group of young men in their 20s who have finished their schooling and stayed in their home village - they loaf about unemployed since they can´t find any work in the remote district. The main characters are more or less idle young fellows whose stories link together and make up the film. Tinged with humour, “The Idle Ones” is a story about frustrated but vital young people in a period of transition, waiting for something to happen. For some, the waiting is becoming their life.

26 Oct. 14.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
19 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Surplus – Terrorised into Being Consumers [VN]
Erik Gandini
52´ Sweden 2002

Why is the lifestyle of consumerism a source of such rage today? How come the privilege of buying goods does not automatically lead to happiness? Why all this emptiness despite our wealth? Erik Gandini's approach through ”Surplus” is to portray this issue from an emotional rather than a factual perspective. Shot in the US, India, China, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Canada and Cuba during three years, ”Surplus” is the result of a complicated editing process by talented music composer/editor/percussionist Johan Söderberg. Much of the film’s theoretical approach to global consumerism is indebted to John Zerzan, the controversial american philosopher whose writings inspired many to take action into the streets.

26 Oct. 14.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
19 Oct. 14.00 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Hidden [VN]
David Aronowich
8´ Sweden 2002

Hidden is an animated short documentary based on an interview with a hidden refugee child in Sweden. It combines the voice of one refugee child with animated images. Giancarlo has no permit to stay in Sweden and he describes how it is to be persecuted. The film travels to Peru and to the school in Sweden but mostly stays in the room where the interview took place. In the room is Giancarlo's father and mother with a newborn baby and
his little brother.

26 Oct. 14.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
19 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Arks [VN]
Karin Karlsson and Mita Moberg
13´ Sweden 2004

One hundred miles north of the Arctic circle, a small community of hardy individuals fish on a frozen lake in temperatures of minus 25 degrees Celsius. This documentary joins them in their cabins or 'arks'.

26 Oct. 14.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
19 Oct. 14.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
I Remember Lena Svedberg [VN]
Carl Johan De Geer
6´ Sweden 1999

O pequeno filme do fotógrafo sueco Carl Johan De Geer é uma homenagem à sua amiga Lena Svedberg, uma artista plástica que se suicidou em 1972 com apenas 26 anos.

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.

26 Oct. 18.15 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
19 Oct. 16.30 - Cinema Londres (Room 1)
Rock Soup
Lech Kowalski
81´ USA 1991

A documentary about a group of homeless people who live in a camp in New York’s Lower East Side: marginalized men and women who, to survive in the heart of this great metropolis, have organized a welcome centre in Culture Plaza, the Rainbow Soup Kitchen, where every guest can receive a hot meal and shelter from the cold. When the city threatens to close the centre to tear down the whole neighbourhood, the homeless come together and start their battle with the city.

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. 22.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Tarch Trip [DF]
Hiroyuki Oki
64´ Japan 1993

A documentary filmmaker, an architect and an artist, Hiroyuki Oki's films are timeless ballads showing sensitive ties to local peoples and environments. Oki follows a seemingly structureless methodology based on chance meetings, trying to capture situations from within a community. By depicting microevents and everyday gestures – the rhythm of life – he attempts to synthesize a "universal" architecture of the world. Shot in the home of the film's creator in Aichi, “Tarch Trip” focuses upon three gay friends, one of whom is HIV positive.

26 Oct. 22.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Pensão Globo [DF]
Matthias Müller
15´ Germany 1997

Müller’s “Pensão Globo” engages both the volatility of film, which the director manipulates in his own laboratory in order to introduce simulated wear and tear signs and to better combine it with found footage, and the fragility of the human body. Going back to his first autobiographical meditation on the pain and death of a friend from AIDS (“Aus der Ferne – The Memo Book”, 1989), the film focuses on a pension room where a dying man prepares to die. Double exposure and double projection techniques create the effect of a ghost shot which is underscored by a written text read aloud by the dying man consisting of the memories of his past life and of his friends.

26 Oct. 22.45 - Culturgest (Small Auditorium)
Album [DF]
Matthias Müller
24´ Germany 2004

Having initially explored the universe of american classical cinema and different techniques associated with the manipulation of found footage, “Album” marks a shift in the work of german director Matthias Müller toward video shooting and the presentation of his works in the gallery and museum context. Without a linear narrative, “Album” was designed to be seen as a video loop, despite the fact that it vaguely takes the diary form as a reference.

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