The international section will show a selection of some of the best documentaries from around the world, produced last season (2009-10). Some have already won awards and received critical acclaim, for others this will be their first screening.
There are three categories:
- Full length – films of over 60 minutes duration
- Medium length – films of between 30 and 60 minutes duration
- Shorts - films lasting fewer than 30 minutes
Investigations
The competitive section Investigations congregates films that seek to meet the critical situations of present and past. By revealing something new, by position themselves before the fact, these films can interfere with the reality or enrich our view of history.
National Competition
A competitive selection showing some of the best Portuguese produced and/or directed documentaries completed during the last year. Most of these will be world premiers.
Retrospectives
Retrospective Joris Ivens
This year, doclisboa pays tribute to a leading figure; supreme role model and founder of documentary film: Joris Ivens, the flying Dutchman (1898-1989). Ivens’ monumental body of work, filmed on five continents, brings into focus the principal historical, sociological and ideological changes that took place in the world during the twentieth century. His work affords us a fascinating view of a world in rapid transformation.
Joris Ivens, an inveterate traveller, provides a splendid example of how to successfully cross poetic imagery (Rain, The Bridge, La Seine a Rencontré Paris) with political engagement (Spanish Earth, The 17th Parallel, Comment Yukong Déplaça les Montagnes). His last partner and co director on over a dozen films, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a survivor of the Nazi extermination camps, will be in Lisbon to give a master class. She will discuss the path she and Joris Ivens’ travelled through the history of film, and political participation through film.
Retrospective Marcel Ophüls
Born on November 1st, 1927 in Frankfurt, Marcel Ophüls started out as an assistant director to his father, the great Max Ophüls. He tackled fiction but it was as a great documentarist that he made his name.
Marcel Ophüls started out as assistant director to his father, Max Ophüls in the middle of the XXth century. He tackled fiction, but it was as a documentary filmmaker that he became most well known. Ophüls was a privileged witness to much of twentieth century history, and through his films was an active participant – it is he who directs the “action”, who questions and raises doubts.
The documentary that brought him most renown was Le chagrin et la Pitié, made in 1969. It cast doubt on the famed generalised “resistance” of the French during the Second World War and showed how collaboration with the enemy was also fact. This caused massive upset.
Each one of Ophüls’ films is a work of terrific perseverance: hours upon hours of filmed material, editing which would sometimes take years, often resulting in unusually long films of three or four hours.
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Ophüls films “live”, an approach he also used for Novembertag, made at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall, or Veillée d’armes, mostly filmed at the notorious Holiday Inn in Sarajevo during the siege. He also persistently filmed the legacy of Nazism, from his “inaugural film”, Munich ou la paix pour cent ans, made for television, through to Le Chagrin et La Pitié and finally, Hôtel Terminus about the trial of “the butcher of Lyon”, Klaus Barbie. However, it has to be said that the work that epitomises his method and concern is the magisterial Veillée d’armes, which besides bearing direct witness to the siege of Sarajevo, calls into question war reporting as a whole and the way journalist-witnesses mould the public’s perceptions – one source is Robert Capa’s much celebrated image of the death of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, which is disputed.
Marcel Ophüls is a great filmmaker and it is important to bring his work to a wider audience.
These and other films by Ophüls will be shown at doclisboa in October during a retrospective of this German film director.
Retrospective Jørgen Leth
Jørgen Leth in 1436 touches
With a film made in practically each of his 45 years dedicated to cinema, Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth is one of the most influential experimental documentarists of all time. His greatest sources of inspiration, however, do not lie in the world of documentary.
The principal schools that precede his work, didactic documentary à la John Grierson and the spontaneity of Direct Cinema, served in essence as counter models. Jorgen’s thinking was forged above all in the artistic melting pot of the underground counter culture of the 50s and 60s; combining free jazz and new cinema, John Cage and Andy Warhol, Living Theatre and Robert Frank.
Leth’s filmography develops mainly along two formal axes, which merge into a hybrid third; the productions of his maturity. First there are those of his films that could be considered conceptual documentaries (The Perfect Human; Good and Evil). Then there is the second group, emerging in the mid ‘70s, of testimonial documentaries that seek to recreate in sound and imagery the torrent of his experiences (Notebook from China; A Sunday in Hell; Aarhus). Little by little, the cinema of Jørgen Leth began to merge these two modes of filmic discourse combining them in one work (Notes on Love or The Five Obstructions – co directed with Lars von Trier).
Doclisboa will present some of this vast body of cinema to the Portuguese public for the first time this coming October.
Thematic Programmes
The Town and the Countryside
Social aspects of the countryside, its rusticity and agricultural lifestyle, and aspects of the town and urbanisation have from very early on been favoured cinema themes. The progressive transformation of rural space and the building of the modern town have almost always been two opposing ecologies in film. Being eminently cinematographic material, the public’s perception has often been moulded by the films themselves. The main purpose of including this cycle lies not in attempting to make exhaustive use of the wealth of material available but rather to train the eye on each of these distinct areas. To show the confrontation between the two by favouring examples made at the same time; where one will at times appear heightened because of the absence of signs of the other and in which the almost irreversible transformation of the space is filmed. Several ways of seeing the countryside are put forward (observing the landscape, the work, the still surviving customs) and the town (its constant transformation, social fabric and the people that live there). These are films about the idea of the countryside and urban utopia, but they are equally about abandonment, about preserving the vestiges of work, about resisting urban and industrial expansion; about the countryside’s struggles and the pace of city life and metropolitan sprawl.
A Tribute to Swiss Documentary
This year, DocLisboa will pay tribute to Swiss documentary, which has a tradition of great work filmed in 16mm and 35mm. Switzerland is a country where robust state support for the arts allows for the creation of true documentary cinema, with regular premiers in proper cinemas. One name that stands out in this programme is Richard Dindo. With a career spanning over 30 years, the Swiss director has made around 20 films almost all of them documentaries (there is just one feature film among them) and biopics: Che Guevara, Jean Genet and Arthur Rimbaud have all been examined through the lens of his camera. Richard Dindo has also called into question his country and its social and political position at different times and events in history. Another recurring theme in Dindo’s cinematography is the conflict between movements of young idealists with fixed political agendas, as in Dani, Michi, Renato & Max an investigation into the role of police brutality in the deaths of four youths.
Rebels and poets, victims and visionaries are given new life through Richard Dindo’s films, which will remain in the filmgoers’ memories as factual reports completely free of dramatic effect.
Risks
The aim of this parallel section to the festival is to showcase daring, innovative work that is situated on the border between fiction and documentary.
Heart beat
This parallel section will present documentaries in which music is a fundamental element. This year there is Heart Beat «vintage», where forgotten masterpieces are rediscovered, or screened for the first time in cinemas. There will also be space for more recent work and some tributes.
Exhibition Malick Sidibé
Exhibition of 85 photographs of Malian photographer.
From 29 September until end October,
tue. to fri., 10 a.m. - 7p.m.
sat. and sun., 2 p.m. - 7 p.m.
doclisboa Vidotheque
1250 titles submitted to doclisboa video library are available at the festival with 18 viewing stations - from 11:00 to 21:00
more info: videoteca@apordoc.org