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IndieLisboa Film Festival London Sessions 2016
11th November
6:30pm – Doors Open – Time for some Eating and Drinking!
8:00pm “Balada de um Batraquio” (Batrachian’s Ballad), Leonor Teles
2016, Documentary, Portugal, 11′
2016 Berlin International Film Festival (Golden Bear for Best Short Film)
“Simultaneously strange and familiar, distant and near, disquieting and seductive, outsider and cosmopolitan, gypsies are shrouded in an aura of ambiguity. They cannot be said to be invisible, as they hardly go unnoticed.” (Daniel Seabra Lopes)
Like the gypsies, the frogs, made of china, don’t go unnoticed to a careful observer. “Batrachian’s Ballad” comes about in a context of ambiguity. A film that immerses itself in the reality of Portuguese everyday life, as a form of fabling about a xenophobic behaviour.
8:15pm -“Freud und Friends”, Gabriel Abrantes
2015, Fiction, Portugal, Switzerland, 23′
With the help of the most consacrated neuroscientists, “Herner Werzog” travels inside the brain of artists and filmmakers from all over the world and documents their dreams. In Lisbon (Portugal), young director Gabriel Abrantes will be the victim..
9:00 pm – “Gypsophila”, Margarida Leitão
2015, Documentary, Experimental, Brazil, Portugal, 61
A woman decides to film her visits to her grandmother. In the quiet home, the camera captures the unique relation between these two women 50 years apart. With days passing by, the lines between film and life increasingly become blurred.
It all started with the urge to film a very intimate and close reality before time changes it forever: my relationship with my grandmother. We are told we have a similar nature, despite 50 years between us. I go to her home alone and soon I discover I cannot hide behind the camera, as I was used to. I have to inhabit the house and the frame as well as her. Now we are together to experience life and film. Is she ready? Am I?.
12th of November
6:30pm – Doors Open – Time for some Eating and Drinking!
Over the course of several months, Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela collected visual testimonies of various labour and ludic activities and other daily practices rooted in empirical knowledge.
Establishing intuitive relations between concrete gestures and substances, sensorial experiences and analogical thinking, the authors have created a fragmentary film immersed on the idea of transformation of matter, generating a revolving movement that metamorphoses itself over time. Throughout a sequence of diverse quotidian activities, solutions and abilities the spectator is conducted over a series of connections in a game of interplay between forms of magic, pleasure, geometry, symbolism and labour.
An old photograph taken 36 years ago. His hand rests on my shoulder. A blessing, a gift.Then a history of over four decades of friendship, admiration and apprenticeship. A journey into Oliveira’s cinema, his method, his way of filming and his extraordinary cinematographic inventions. He lived for over a century, over a century of cinema, cinema in its entirety. His turns of fortune and his knowledge, my own turns of fortune. For him, and for me now, documentary and fiction films go hand in hand; it is all about cinema. So I had the audacity to film a magnificent story that Manoel loved but never filmed, one that he left behind as if his hand and eyes were close to God, or among the gods, and he was steering me so that even now he can continue to film through me.
IndieLisboa Film Festival London Series is supported by Camões Institute.