The 20th edition of Doclisboa closed this weekend on an upbeat note with festival director Miguel Ribeiro reporting audiences were back to pre-pandemic levels.
“We are closing the festival with a great sense of having been a big celebration of cinema, a great get-together,” said Ribeiro. ”There was a feeling of joy in the corridors of the venues and during the informal encounters, the parties at the end of each day.”
Nikita Lavretski’s A Date In Minsk won the festival’s main prize, the City of Lisbon Award for best international competition film. This one-shot documentary is mainly set in a billiard room in Minsk where a young couple are trying to reignite their foundering relationship by pretending they have only just met.
“It’s a playful film, a fun film but highly engaged,” said Ribeiro. “It is playing with so many codes of cinema.”
Spanish director Alejandro Vasquez’s A Landscaped Area Too Quiet For Me won the YouTube international competition jury award. The director follows his elderly grandmother who is writing her memoirs and his 95-year old grandfather, a film industry veteran. “They love me and I love them, we have always been very close, I was born in their house, they raised me. That allowed for a very high level of complicity and intimacy,” Vasquez said of his very intimate documentary, almost entirely shot in the grandparents’ small home. It touches not only on the protagonists’ history but that of their country as well.
Irene M. Borrego’s The Visitt And The Secret Garden won the HBO Max award for best Portuguese competition feature.
One popular surprise winner in the new talent award category was the now middle-aged Léo Liotard for his film, It’s Party Time. This is a documentary based around Hi-8 camcorder footage the director shot of himself and his high-spirited friends 25 years ago, when he was a student in the mid -1990s living in a small town in France. Liotard had since given up on filmmaking and works as a French teacher in Brussels - but edited the old footage together during the pandemic and submitted the film to Doclisboa.
“This was one of those magical moments of going through the submissions and finding a film that brings so much into the programme,” said Ribeiro. “We build a big part of our programme through the submissions and it is always a very important place to find these kind of gems.”
Industry awards
Earlier in the week, 12 projects from 10 countries, including several Latin-American documentaries, were pitched as part of Arché. Portuguese director Paulo Carneiro’s Savannah And The Mountain won the best project in editing or first cut stage awards, sponsored by RTP. This is set in a remote village targeted by a huge mining company which hopes to set up in business there. It is produced bt Portugal’s BAM Cinema, with Alex Piperno of Uruguay’s La Pobladora Cine.
Continuum, by Argentinian director Mariana Bomba picked up the Selina award for best project in the writing or development stage. Produced by Vanessa Ragone of Argentina’s Haddock Films, the film tells of a love story between two women in the early 1990s. These women were key figures in the blossoming of a new wave of feminist filmmakers in Argentina.
Spanish director Alberto Dexeus’s House Made Of Mist won the special Arché jury award. This is a personal family story in which the director writes a letter to his dead grandmother while also trying to find out more about the death of his great aunt, killed in the Spanish civil war. Boogaloo Films is developing the project.
Buzz projects
Pitches warmly received by international attendees included Colombian production Welcome Interplanetary And Sidereal Space Conquerors from director Andrés Jurado. This tells the extraordinary true story of how, as part of their training for their trip to the moon, Nasa astronauts including Neil Armstrong did survival training in South American rainforests, meeting indigenous people in the process.
Also admired by international broadcasters and distributors in attendance was Luis Alejandro Yero’s Calls From Moscow, following four queer Cuban immigrants in Russia illegally shortly before the Ukrainian revolution. This is being put together as a Cuban-German coproduction and is produced by Berlin-based Cosmic Productions. The film is in the editing phase.
On Friday, Alex Shiriaieff of Baltic to Black Sea Documentary - B2B Doc - was in Lisbon to talk about the work of his Stockholm-based NGO which supports documentary filmmakers from Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Filmmakers from this region, Shiriaieff pointed out, face challenges far more daunting than those encountered by documentary makers in western Europe.
“In every country, we have ongoing wars, occupied territories and social conflict,” he said.
Public funding is scant or non-existent. Nonetheless, exceptional work is being made. Shiriaieff screened around 10 minutes of footage of Displaced, the feature doc being made by Olha Zhurba in Ukraine and already generating buzz at co-production events. Produced by Darya Bassel of Moon Man, this has leading Danish outfit Final Cut For Real (behind Flee and The Act Of Killing) as a coproduction partner.
The film follows Ukrainian refugees forced to leave home at the start of the war. The footage in Lisbon showed these refugees cramming into trains at the railway station during the mass evacuation. It is being billed as an “epic film” about crowds. Another part of the film follows a baker who stays on the front line and continues to make and deliver bread during the war. The soundtrack will include phone calls to hotlines from Ukrainian citizens, looking for their relatives.
The project, of which 80% has already been shot, will also be pitched at IDFA next month.
Nebulae awards
Earlier, the festival’s industry “networking space”, Nebulae confirmed its awards for projects in development. The DAE talen encouragement award went to Beyond Landscape, directed by Etienne de France and produced by French outfit, Futur Anterieur.
The Pitch the Doc award was presented to Under The Volcano directed by Sara Rastegar and Simone PozziJ and made through Bocalupo Film in France and Altara Films in Italy.
The Dafims award was picked up by Lettre A Eric Pauwels Ou A Florista E O Cônsul directed by Clara Josta and made through Stenar Projects in Portugal and Tamara Films in France.
Doclisboa ran from October 6 - 16. The next edition will take place October 19-29, 2023.
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