The 21st edition of DocLisboa will open with Wang Bing’s Man In Black, and will close with Baan from Portuguese director Leonor Teles.
Man In Black premiered at Cannes and Baan made its debut at Locarno earlier this year.
The festival will take place in Lisbon from October 19-29.
Wang Bing, via videoconference, and Telles both participated in the festival press conference on September 28 at which festival director Miguel Ribeiro revealed this year’s programme in full.
Bing explained his film profiles 86-year-old Wang Xilin, one of China’s most important contemporary classical composers, a “man in black” who has lived and worked through some very turbulent times.
“We’ve known each other for 20 years, I really like his work as a composer. But we can’t separate his music and his personal experience from the history of China, it’s all connected to the political reality,” the Chinese director reflected.
Telles also shared insights on her film Baan, her first fictional feature, which follows a young woman on an emotional journey of self-discovery. She is in Lisbon to start her architecture career but also has an intimate connection with Bangkok.
“We tried for Baan to be a portrait of this generation of young people who are trying to live in this very chaotic and difficult Lisbon, and of how it’s like for us to continue to live and feel the challenges we now have, which are quite different from those that my parents’ generation faced,” the director commented.
The festival’s international competition includes films that range in length from 10 to 110 minutes. The feature documentaries in this section include Italian director Julián D’Angiolillo’s Ongoing Cave, a meditative work about the divers who work in caves, often rescuing people; Alexandru Badea’s Magnificent Sky, a portrayal of the avant-garde Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram; Olivier Godin’s Suite Canadienne, about a group of dancers who disguise themselves as peasants; and Marc Isaacs’ This Blessed Plot, which follows Chinese filmmaker as. she visits an English village in search of characters for her next film.
The From the Earth to the Moon section is screening new titles from two living legends of the documentary world, Theatre Of Thought from Werner Herzog, and the latest Fred Wiseman doc, Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros.
It also includes provocative new work from Alain Cavalier, Danielle Arbid, Nafis Fathollahzadeh, Maxime Martinot, Uma Celma, Julien Elie, Veljko Vidak, Coline Grando and Nicolas Peduzzi.
The Heart Beat section is showing a film about the bad boy of the UK music scene, Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin, directed by his wife, the French filmmaker Katia de Vidas.
In the same lineup, Portuguese audiences will be able to see titles including Let The Canary Sing, an intimate portrait of pop idol Cyndi Lauper directed by Alison Ellwood; Big Bang Henda, by Fernanda Polacow, and Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning, by Julia Fuhr Mann.
Meanwhile, New Visions, which focuses on work with an irreverent and experimental edge, has selected Frente A Guernica directed by Yervant Gianikian and the late Angela Ricci. It is also screening Revolution+1 in which director Masao Adachi reconstructs the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe.
There are further titles from Luciana Fina, Peter Schreiner and the collective Terrorismo de Autor,
Highlights throughout the rest of the programme include Portrait Of Gina, a previously unreleased Orson Welles film about Gina Lollobrigida, which premiered in Venice, and Stephen Kijak’s Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, an HBO documentary about the 1950s actor and heartthrob.
The festival is hosting a retrospective spotlighting the cinema of the American New Deal period. Programmed in collaboration with the Cinemateca Portuguesa, this includes work from directors including Boris Ivens, Leo Hurwitz, Pare Lorentz, Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand.
There will also be a retrospective of the careers of Finnish doc makers Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio, often described as “heirs to Robert Flaherty.
Nebulae, the festival’s industry section, runs from October 19-24 .
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