Heart Beat and From the Earth to the Moon programmes close with new announcements

More confirmations in the Heart Beat programme suggest a closer look into the realm of not just music, but also literature and the ‘rock’ documentary, and the essencial role that they detain.

Daniel Johnston, the north-american cult musician, who enchanted us with his sweet melodies, with his songs on the poetry of the mundane, passed away last September 11th of the present year. Johnston’s influence in the world of music is not just apparent, it will prevail: his voice, his music have touched – and are still surely to touch – various generations of artists. That said, in homage to this musician, doclisboa has programmed a special session, included in the Heart Beat section. 
In this session, Gabriel Sunday’s short film, Hi, How Are You Daniel Johnston, a true biographic document, originated from an intimate interview with the musician, which rediscovers and connects the artist not only with his most expansive dreams, but also to characters from his past, will be screened along with the concert-film by Antony Crofts, The Angel and Daniel Johnston – Live at the Union Chapel, which celebrates Johnston in one of the most praised moments of his career.

From the poetry of Johnston’s music, to the poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner. One of the most awaited films in this section is, without a doubt, the World Premiere of Sophia, na Primeira Pessoa, by Manuel Mozos. A documentary which brings the writer, one of the biggest and most awarded icons of Portuguese literature, to the place where social memory meets an intense research work. From Porto to Lisboa, from Granja to Lagos, from the Atlantic Sea to the Mediterranean, from Greece to April’s 25th, we travel around the passions and deceptions of a life and work dedicated to the search of the real, the freedom and the justice. A film possessed by the most beautiful melancholia, which shows us who Sophia was: the woman inside the poet whose mission was to “look, see and say that she has seen”.

Closing the Heart Beat programme, the world of cinema is celebrated with an homage to the work of D.A. Pennebaker, by way of a restored copy of Don’t Look Back, a portrait of cinema verité in which we recall Bob Dylan during his tour around England in the mid 60’s. Recently deceased, Pennebaker shot a myriad of personalities, from David Bowie to John F. Kennedy, and would be making his fundamental contribution not only in what refers to the constitution of the iconography of various musicians – Dylan’s is perhaps the most striking of all -, but also to the history of the cinematic documentary.

From the Earth to the Moon completes its programme of the 17th Edition of doclisboa.

The Doclisboa announces that Un Film Dramatique, a Éric Baudelaire film, will be part of the programme this year, following its remarkable presence at the Locarno Film Festival (Official Selection) and at TIFF. A film that dialogs with the creative instincts of twenty students from the Dora Maar school at the Parisian suburbs in what was an experimental project that assembles four years of work. Humorous, intimate and enlightening, Baudelaire’s film debates the urgency of subjects matters such as those of ethnicity, discrimination, among other representations of power and identity. All the while, a generation that grew up with selfies and Youtube questions the collaborative nature of cinema, inside of which they see themselves becoming the authors of their own lives.

The festival announces four world premieres, of four Portuguese productions.

Pierre-Marie Goulet is back three years after Antes das Pontes, to a film that evokes muslim culture’s silent permanence existing within the Portuguese culture, in his search for the sentiment of a subterranean analogy in images and sounds. From Portuguese and Turkish topographic and cultural data, The Last Port – Beyond the Bridge weaves the bonds between two apparently distant universes to each other.

To follow, a new version of Judenrein, by Daniel Blaufuks. A personal work with the duration of just ten minutes, which rescues amateur images from an old 80s reel, acquired on eBay, and which examines the story of a small polish town, where jews where once the larger part of the population, now disappeared in the aftermath of their return from the concentration camps.

Sonhámos um País, by Camilo de Sousa e Isabel Noronha, illustrates (and denounces) the story behind the reeducation camps, in Moçambique. A film that analyses, in the present day, a little known post-colonial reality, where the antagonism of the country’s post-independency liberation is strongly explored through the use of Camilo de Sousa’s filmic archive (collected, at the time, for FRELIMO, with propaganda purposes), along with a conversation between Camilo de Sousa and Isabel Noronha.

And Suzanne Daveau, by Luisa Homem, which delineates the outline of an adventurous woman who crosses the 20th century to this day, guided by her passion for geographic investigation.

Inside this reflective framework, we can also find 143 rue du désert, by Hassen Ferhani, a film about a woman who welcomes truck drivers, vagabonds and dreams in the middle of the Algerian Sahara, which was also highlighted at the last edition of the Locarno Festival; and Zustand und Gelände, awarded with the prize for Best First Film at the Marseille Film Festival, directed by Ute Adamczewski, a film in pursuit of representing the case for ‘protective custody’ and which looks into suppression and the resistance of political opposition, traumatic experiences, through a vast number of archive materials.

To conclude, two films: Adolescentes, by Sébastien Lifschitz, – whose world premiere happened at Locarno’s Critic Week – paints a unique portrait of France and its recent history in its illustration of two teenage girls who, from the ages of 13 to 18, suffer radical transformations that end up defining their daily lives forever; and La Vida en Común, a film by Ezequiel Yanco, which creates a discourse that blends History with smalls stories, thus outlining complex identities in an indigenous community in the north of Argentine in the film’s foreground.