::: doclisboa 2008 :::

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Programme doclisboa 2008


	T	F	S	S	M	T	W	T	F	S	S	M	T	W
Programme day by day	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29

October 22 – tuesday

22 OCT. 11.00 – Culturgest (large auditorium)
MASTER CLASS WISEMAN
The Last Letter (La Dernière Lettre) RW
Frederick Wiseman
61´ USA 2002, BW
A film with a specific face and body: the one that belongs to Anna Semyonovna (interpreted by French actress Catherine Samie). The Last Letter is based on a chapter of Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate”. It is 1941 and a Ukrainian ghetto has fallen to the Nazis. All of its Jewish residents are to be murdered. In the midst of the impending horror, the town’s physician, a woman named Anna Semionova, dictates one final letter to her son, who is safe outside of enemy lines. The letter, with its detailed observations of the daily life in a ghetto, reveals the fear, courage, frailty, compassion and dignity of this woman..

22 OCT. 14.15 – Culturgest (small auditorium) | 19 OCT. 20.30 - Londres (room 1)
Polish Shorts CP
Krzysztof Kieslowski
Bricklayer, 1973, 18’
Hospital, 1976, 22’
From a Night Porter’s Point of View, 1978, 17’
Seven Women of Different Ages, 1978, 16’
Railway Station, 1980, 14’
Talking Heads, 1980, 16’

22 OCT. 15.00 - Londres (room 1) | 19 OCT. 18.15 – Culturgest (small auditorium)
In the Land of the Cranes SE
Lisa Hagstrand
29´ Sweden 2008
During a voyage to Shangai, China, director Lisa Hangstrand discovered that a bridge was being built in the Island of Chongming, where one of the most important nature reserves of the world is located. The local inhabitants and the workers in the reserve don’t know what the future of the island will bring. Complex environmental questions are at stake.
The Lie of the Land I
Molly Dineen
74´ United Kingdom 2007
The Lie of the Land, portrays the perversion of England’s contemporary food production system. Squeezed by the price politics imposed by the great supermarkets and the increasing number of laws and legislation in their field, many farmers question themselves about how they can sustain their way of life. The Lie of the Land looks closely into the possible disappearance of traditional British rural world.

22 OCT. 16.00 - Londres (room 2) | 17 OCT. 21.30 - Museu do Oriente | 25 OCT. 16.15 – Culturgest (small auditorium)
The Last Lumberjacks MC
Yu Guangyi
90´ China 2006
The portrait of the lives of a group of loggers in the Heilongjiang Province of China, facing harsh weather conditions during their work in the old woodcut industry. Documenting a mode of production that is disappearing due to civilization’s progress, The Last Lumberjacks depicts how forests have been exploited for a living over more than a century in this region, using ancient techniques from one generation to another.

22 OCT. 16.15 – Culturgest (small auditorium) | 16 OCT. 18.00 - Londres (room 2)
Hold Me tight, Let Me Go SE
Kim Longinotto
100´ United Kingdom 2007
The Mulberry Bush School in Oxfordshire is a boarding school where children are sent when other institutions are no longer able to contain them. It has 40 children and 108 staff, a ratio that seems generous until you see how the staff has to put up the beatings, kicking and insults from these children with severe emotional trauma. Excluded from school for extreme behaviour, and often coming from dysfunctional families, they are given three years at the Oxford boarding school to try to turn their lives around. The children slam from one emotional extreme to another, but can also, from time to time, express some tenderness.

22 OCT. 16.30 – Culturgest (large auditorium) | 17 OCT. 21.00 - Londres (room 2)
Damages I
Thomas Balmès
68´ France/Finland 2007
Every year in the United States, billions of dollars are paid out in personal damages. Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder is one of the biggest legal firms specialized in this type of case. Damages shows, cynically and ironically, the various aspects of this form of advocacy. What’s the best strategy to get the highest compensations? Through several cases, we observe the daily work of the firm's lawyers as they meet the victims and families of victims, examine documents, create a script and try to put a value for each human life.

22 OCT. 17.00 – São Jorge (room 3) | 26 OCT. 23.30 – São Jorge (room 3)
The Double Life of Dona Ermelinda
(A Dupla Vida de Dona Ermelinda) NF, NI
Aldo Lee
68´ France/United Kingdom/Portugal 1995
The Double Life of Dona Ermelinda investigates the mysterious life of filmmaker Aldo Lee’s grandmother. At the age of 72, after the independence of Mozambique, Dona Ermelinda decided to deny her colonial past and fall in love with a black man. A radical change in her life as well as for the history of her country, making this film a peculiar drama of family investigation.

22 OCT. 17.30 - Londres (room 1) | 19 OCT. 18.45 – Culturgest (large auditorium)
Novela na Santa Casa CI
Cathie Levy
121´ France/Brazil 2007
Novela na Santa Casa is a film about the dreams of women who attend Enfermaria 38 at Santa Casa da Misericórdia, the address of Professor Ivo Pitanguy’s Plastic Surgery Service, accessible to all social classes. For 5 months, French filmmaker Cathie Levy followed seven charismatic characters that were looking for the joy of rebirth.

22 OCT. 18.00 - Londres (room 2) | 17 OCT. 23.00 – Culturgest (large auditorium)
Streets of Sorrow (Ruas da Amargura) CN
Rui Simões
111´ Portugal 2008
Ruas da Amargura is a documentary about men and women of all ages in need of affection, dealing with financial or mental problems, alcoholism, drug addiction, or persons who simply arrived in Portugal looking for a better life. In the other side of the Street, there’s a crowd of volunteers, social workers and several technicians that build and keep the structures of social support, some of them hoping for better days to come, others institutionalizing its aid without believing that this phenomenon will ever have a cure. A job so often ungrateful and unsuccessful, mostly because, among other reasons, its lack of coordination.

22 OCT. 18.30 – Culturgest (large auditorium) | 18 OCT. 21.00 - Londres (room 2)
The Women of Brukman I
Isaac Isitan
90´ Canada 2007
For a few years, filmmaker Isaac Isitan lived inside Brukman, an Argentinean clothing factory on the verge of bankruptcy and expropriation after a social revolution made by women workers. An epic film, The Women of Brukman tells the unique story of a cooperative formed against the background of Argentina's devastating economic collapse, working to give these women their jobs back. An example of success and persistence that created a movement of hope in Argentinean society and that became a sociological “case study”.

22 OCT. 18.30 – Culturgest (small auditorium)
Masterclass Thomas Balmès

22 OCT. 20.30 – Londres (room 1) | 20 OCT. 21.00 – Culturgest (large auditorium)
Standard Operating Procedure SE
Errol Morris
111´ USA 2008
The photographs taken at Abu Ghraib’s prison in Baghdad changed the way the United States saw itself as a nation. But one mystery remains unsolved: do these notorious images provide proof of systematic torture at the hands of the American Army? Or do they just document the abnormal behaviour of a few moral deviators? Through the account of officials who took the photographs and of those who appear in them, the documentary thoroughly examines the context of the images. The spectator might get perplexed: how can such abject acts of humiliation and torture (in most cases against innocents who were accused by chance) be classified by the American jurisdiction as “Standard Operating Procedures”?

22 OCT. 20.45 – Culturgest (small auditorium) | 17 OCT. 23.00 - Londres (room 2)
End of the Rainbow CI
Robert Nugent
83´ France 2007
A big multinational mining company transfers a large prospecting gold unit to a remote region of Guinea Conacry, West Africa. In this desperately poor place, the presence of the mine creates an atmosphere of change and conflict among the local inhabitants. What are the advantages of the so proclaimed progress in an African village? The transformation of the world imposed by money doesn’t mean necessarily happiness or a better way of life.

22 OCT. 21.00 – Culturgest (large auditorium)
The Class (Entre les Murs) R&E
Laurent Cantet
128´ France 2008
The winner of the Golden Palm of Cannes Film Festival’s last edition and a real event in France: The Class illustrates the cultural multiplicity and the several tensions accumulated inside a high school class in Paris. Adapted from the homonymous book of professor, reporter and writer François Begaudeau (who performs as himself in this film), this project shows the daily experience of teaching to real students who also performed as themselves in an ambiguous chronicle about contemporary Europe.

22 OCT. 21.00 - Londres (room 2) | 17 OCT. 18.15 – Culturgest (small auditorium)
Divorce Albanian Style I
Adela Peeva
66´ Bulgaria 2007
Three love stories interrupted during Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship in Albania, or the story of three couples that were destroyed and men who committed the sin of choosing foreign women as their wives. In some cases, the totalitarian ideology turned their own sons against their mothers. Three stories of Estate crimes – that represent a thousand of others – of which the unpunished responsible are still proud.

22 OCT. 21.30 – São Jorge (room 3) | 23 OCT. 22.00 – São Jorge (room 1)
Kuxa Kanema: O Nascimento do Cinema M
Margarida Cardoso
52´ Portugal 2003
The first cultural act of Mozambique’s government after independence in 1975 was the foundation of the National Institute of Cinema [NIC]. The new President, Samora Machel, had a strong awareness of the cinematic potential of creating an image for a new socialist nation. All over the country, cinema road units were screening NIC’s most popular production, a newsreel untitled Kuxa Kanema, which means The Birth of Cinema. People’s Republic of Mozambique became the Republic of Mozambique and NIC, once a great enterprise, was reduced to abandoned rooms and corridors, where its staff stood patiently waiting for retirement. The building was destroyed by a fire in 1991, and the visual documents that witness the first eleven years of independence - the years of the socialist revolution - rotting in a building, were about to be forgotten. From these and other living testimonies, we recover the daily path of a nation’s fallen ideal, “one cinema for the people”, and the dreams of those who believed that Mozambique could one day become a different country.

22 OCT. 21.30 - Museu do Oriente | 18 OCT. 16.15 – Culturgest (small auditorium) | 20 OCT. 16.00 - Londres (room 2)
The Square MC
Zhang Yuan & Dua Jing-Chuan
100´ China 1994
Directors Hang Yuan and Dua Jing-Chuan choose not only to focus on the set of one of the most famous squares of the world, Tiananmen, but to also draw a meticulous portrait of the daily life of this place. Directed in 1994, five years after the events on the 4th of June of 1989, the duo steps away from political or historical considerations. They choose instead to reveal the daily details: a police statue, the image of tourists taking pictures, the rite to hoist and to strike the flag, or people making exercise.

22 OCT. 22.00 – São Jorge (room 1) | 18 OCT. 21.30 – São Jorge (room 3)
Arquivos moçambicanos M
The Blood of Silence (Ibo - O Sangue do Silêncio)
Kuxa Kanema 1, 63, 262
These Are the Weapons (Estas são as Armas)
Murillo Salles e Bernardo Honwana
106´ Mozambique
The recovery process of the historical archives from Mozambique Cinema Institute began in 2008. This session reunites the first recovered images from the post-independent period (Kuxa Kanema; Ibo, The Blood of Silence; These Are the Weapons). These Are the Weapons – by Murillo Salles and Bernardo Honwana – won the Silver Dove at the Leipzig Festival in 1978 and was the biggest ticket-office in Mozambique’s movie history.

22 OCT. 22.30 - Londres (room 1) | 21 OCT. 18.15 – Culturgest (small auditorium)
Frantz Fanon, The Memories From The Asylum
(Frantz Fanon: Mémoire d’Asile) I
Abdenour Zahzah e Bachir Ridouh
53´ Argélia 2008
A philosopher, revolutionary and theorist, Frantz Fanon was one of the most influential authors of post-colonial studies. His works about decolonization inspired the independence movements for more than three decades (Jean-Paul Sartre recognized him as the figure “with the voice that the Third World speaks for and finds itself”). His work in psychiatric hospitals also influenced some of Michel Foucault’s theories. This film reconstitutes the life of Fanon and examines his theories of identity and race, as well as his involvement in the struggle against colonialism and racism.

22 OCT. 22.45 – Culturgest (small auditorium) | 19 OCT. 15.00 - Londres (room 1)
Videoletter DF
Shuntaro Tanikawa & Shuji Tereyama
74´ Japan 1983
Video-letter is a remarkable compilation that follows an exchange of video-letters that took place between Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama's death. It can be seen as a home video produced by two prominent poets that is interlaid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals, sometimes touching, sometimes extravagant, where two artists reflect about death, talent and wisdom.

22 OCT. 23.00 - Londres (room 2) | 24 OCT. 16.45 – Culturgest (large auditorium)
Dear Mara, Letters from a Trip Through Patagonia
(Querida Mara, Cartas de Un Viaje por Patagonia) CI
Carlos Echeverría
90´ Argentina 2007
A group of sheep shearers from a village on the Argentine pampas travel across Patagonia on a bus every year, moving from one farm to another. A journey narrated by an anonymous voice that reads his letters written to his beloved wife Mara, complemented with short monologues in which the shearers tell theirs stories and talk about their experiences.

22 OCT. 23.15 – Culturgest (large auditorium) | 20 OCT. 18.00 - Londres (room 2)
The Man Who Jumped (U Omãi Qe Dava Pulus) CN
João Pinto Nogueira
76´ Portugal 2008
Author of three novels: A Noite e o Riso, Directa, Square Tolstoi and a compilation of tales: Estação. He was also a screenwriter of Os Verdes Anos, Portuguese New Cinema’s inaugural film, and co-director with Gerard Castello-Lopes of Nacionalidade: Português. Born to a catholic conservative family, he becomes a militant of MAR (Movement of Revolutionary Action) and later secretly interviews Álvaro Cunhal. He joined the Revolutionary Brigades of Carlos Antunes and Isabel do Carmo and worked in the meantime in the Portuguese permanent representation at the OCDE. Who was Nuno Bragança?

22 OCT. 23.30 – São Jorge (room 3) | 25 OCT. 24.00 – São Jorge (room 1)
A Televisão nos Bairros M
Moira Forjaz, Licínio Azevedo & Miguel Arraes
20´ Portugal/Mozambique 1980
In the early years of Mozambique’s Experimental Television, public “screenings” were made throughout several neighbourhoods. Usually, a small TV device was put in a huge sports centre so that the population could contact with this novelty. Moira Forjaz filmed one of these exhibitions and interviewed locals. Licínio Azevedo and Miguel Arraes edited the movies.
Treatment for Traitors M
de Ike Bertels (from filmed material by Ruy Guerra)
53´ Netherlands 1983
1982. The socialistic government of Mozambique – at that time a young independent country in southern Africa - organized a meeting of great political importance. President Samora Machel and his governments’ leaders held a session for a week with thousands of collaborators: people who betrayed their compatriots, sometimes even tortured them by order of Portugal at the time of its colonial domination of Mozambique. They are known as “the compromised”. They voluntarily joined the ANP fascist party or became agents of the secret police PIDE, or even soldiers in the colonial army.

22 OCT. 24.00 – São Jorge (room 1) | 17 OCT. 23.30 – São Jorge (room 3)
Going Against Fate HB
Viviane Blumenschein
80´ Germany 2008
Going Against Fate Going Against Fate follows the American conductor David Zinman and the Tonhalle-Orchestra Zurich during the rehearsals, concerts and recordings of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony, moments in which the charismatic David Zinman provides both intimate stories and information about the personal life of the Austrian composer. At the same time, we look behind the scenes and witness how the conductor and his orchestra interact on their journey towards the finished recording, as they unravel the secret of a musical masterpiece: the symphony.