This showcase’s programming is guided by our concern in decentralizing the exhibition of Portuguese films. We tried to create a space of visibility for the most recent national production, contributing for the creation of a space, in Serpa, capable of arising interest in documentary cinema.
The Alqueva dam resumed its construction in 1995. The new plans for the dam sentenced Aldeia da Luz to its disappearance. Its population must be relocated to a new village. To analyse the impact this change will have on the residents, three families, one of farmers, one of shopkeepers and the other of the town’s poet, were followed over the period of two years, until March 2001.
A time that although still present in Cape Verde, is already part of our affective memory: traditional toys. A poetic vision of an ever more distant childhood.
During one summer, in two islands of the archipelago of Cape Verde, the film follows the creative process behind two shows that will be presented at the Mindelo theater festival. It also offers a look at life off stage, closely following people who want to find ways to express a new identity, ‘an Africa’. Rehearsals and backstage action, the birth and discussion of ideas in the Raiz di Polon and Terra a Terra dance groups, the Otaca theater groups, and the Acrobats of Pedra Rolada. The use of the body as an instrument of creation. And a musician, Orlando Pantera, who shows us the path of inspiration: ‘more soul…’.
A remix of archive footage, not only from the revolution of the 25th of April 1974, but also from the times lived under Salazar’s dictatorship, the ongoing revolutionary process, and subsequent demonstrations.
In October 2000, when Graça Castanheira is in Belgrade to film the experience of filmmaking couple Zoran and Svetlana Popovic who run a film school in town, History breaks out around them, with the population taking in their own hands the fall of Milosevic’s regime (who had been defeated in the elections, but resisted abandoning the country’s administration). Instead of dropping the project, Castanheira expanded it. She filmed the revolt as it unfolded, and in relation to the couple’s microcosm.
A film in four parts. Four young people film their memories, their emotion and their experience of an Africa they have always known and have yet never been to. Four stories that represent the feeling of a generation whose grandparents went to live in Africa. A look at a past reflected in each one’s present.
Artist and gallery owner Carlos Barroco was born in Lisbon in 1946. Barroco attended the António Arroio School of Arts in the capital and began exhibiting his paintings in 1974. In the 1980s, he founded the Novo Século Gallery in Lisbon, where he launched emerging artists. In addition to painting, he also worked in installation, performance and multimedia, and had several international exhibitions. He passed away in 2015.
Margarida Cardoso was born in Tomar, Portugal. She studied Image and Audiovisual Communication at the António Arroio School of Arts in Lisbon. From 1982 to 1995 she worked in Portugal and France as an assistant director, annotator and scene photographer. In 1995, she began writing and directing her own films, exploring subjects that intersect her personal history with prominent issues in Portugal’s recent history, such as the colonial war in Africa, the revolution and the end of the colonial era.
Portuguese director and anthropologist. Born in Porto, she studied Social Anthropology, did her Masters in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester and her PhD at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa with the thesis Camponeses do Cinema. Between 1994 and 2000 she worked at the National Museum of Ethnology. She is an Assistant Professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Coordinator of the Master’s Degree in Anthropology – Visual Cultures. She also teaches on the Masters and PhD programs at the University of São Paulo and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Barcelona. In 2000 she founded the film production company Laranja Azul with Catarina Mourão. Her work and publications in documentary and ethnography stand out.
Edgar Pêra is a Portuguese filmmaker. Pêra is also an artist and comic book artist, and writes essays on fiction and cinema. Edgar Pêra studied Psychology, but switched to Cinema at the Portuguese National Conservatory, now the Lisbon School of Theater and Cinema. Edgar Pêra is currently one of the most prolific Portuguese directors with hundreds of audiovisual works to his name and one of the authors who continues to break down barriers with his experimental cinema.
After attending the London School of Film Technique on a scholarship from the Fundo do Cinema Nacional, Fernando Matos Silva taught at the Army Film Course and directed for the military between 1969 and 1970. His feature film ‘O Mal Amado’ was the last Portuguese film to be censored by the Estado Novo and the first to be released after the end of the dictatorship. This symbolic charge, which seems to be foreshadowed by the film itself, subtly accompanies the others. As well as directing, he has been involved as a screenwriter, producer and editor in various national productions, collaborating with directors such as Fernando Lopes and Paulo Rocha.
Graça Castanheira was born in colonial Angola in 1962. After the 25 April Revolution, the family returned to Portugal where, in 1989, Graça finished her training at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. Her films explore stories across borders with their own current questions.