I’ve always been fascinated by the Portuguese culture, observing it from afar – by this close linguistic cousin of ours, with whom we share, among other things, the fact that we both have words considered untranslatable (at least, not perfectly) to describe emotions that combine sadness and happiness: dor and saudade. And, in recent years, I have always wondered how come this country is the vital source of so much of the best cinema that is currently being made on the continent: Pedro Costa, Miguel Gomes, Rita Azevedo Gomes, and Joao Pedro Rodriguez, among many others, made under the firmament of Manoel de Oliveira, Antonio Reis, Margarita Cordeiro, or Paulo Rocha.

This made me all the more joyful when I had the opportunity to take a little tour through the heart of Portuguese cinema at the 20th edition of the IndieLisboa, one of the best-known festivals on the continent – which is also a particularly important festival for Romanian cinema, as it was one of the first major international festivals that spotlighted the New Romanian Cinema with its 2008 retrospective dedicated to the movement, less than one year after Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or. And, last but not least, I couldn’t help thinking about Romanian critic Alex Leo. Șerban during these past couple of days, as I walked the sloping streets of Lisbon, of the series of letters he wrote from the city and the months he spent here shortly before his passing, of his love for Pessoa – ultimately carrying the feeling that this city and festival have a special significance for modern Romanian cinephilia.

The first thing that strikes a new visitor to IndieLisboa is its sheer breadth: not so much in terms of numbers (over 350 short and feature films were part of this edition’s selection), but especially the diversity of sections and of the approaches that are set in motion at the festival. On the one hand, there are national and international competitions, along with the Silvestre showcase, dedicated to avant-garde cinema – where one could find some new films alongside some of last year’s big titles, many of them from Cannes (De Humani Corpore Fabrica), Berlin (Music, Here, Samsara, Cidade Rabat, In Water, etc.), Venice (Saint Omer, Trenque Lauquen), even Visions du Reel (Astrakan 79, Incident).

On the other hand, one could enjoy the ample selection of IndieJunior (the first half of every single day was dedicated to children’s screenings), the Mouth of Madness horror marathon, the Indiemusic section (dedicated to documentaries about music: everything from CAN and King Crimson to Little Richard) and the Smart7 competition (the result of the merger of seven festivals, including TIFF).

Finally, there are the retrospectives: where I allowed myself a bit of cinephile indulgence and which I followed closely at this edition, mostly hosted at the impressive Portuguese Cinematheque (Cinemateca Portuguesa) – truly one of the most beautiful in the world, with its starry ceiling, and its entrance signals: Somewhere Under the Rainbow for the larger Dr. Felix Ribeiro hall, and the theme from Le Mepris for the little Luis Ribeiro hall.

Jan Švankmajer: Cabinet of Curiosities

The first of these retrospectives – and the largest of them all, as it was organized in collaboration with the Cinematheque – is the festival’s auteur retrospective: dedicated this year to the legendary Czech experimental maestro, Jan Švankmajer, who released what he announced will be his final film last year, Kunstkamera. An excellent occasion – a fair share of these films were screened on 35mm, an especially rare treat, considering the filmmaker’s very precise and elaborate manner of editing (both in terms of his elaborate stop-motion animation methods, but his baroque usage of set design and of poetic juxtapositions), and also because this particular medium truly highlights the materiality of these films and of his technique.

Across the four short film programs (together with a selection of nine features, which also counted his 1994 masterpiece, Faust), curated thematically, even figuratively in its third program (a cabinet of curiosities featuring animals, vegetation, and strange objects), one notices the sheer tonal variety of Švankmajer: ranging from incredible lightness and playfulness – to those that are grave, dark, anguished, obsessively circling concepts such as death and entropy.

In the first category, for example, there is Meat Love (1989) – a minute-long love story between two pieces of uncooked steak, loving each other with abandon before being thrown in the frying pan – or Jabberwocky (1971) and Picnic With Weissmann (1969), in which the “central character” is an empty suit, wandering through a room full of toys that take on a life of their own, or lounging lazily in a park where playing cards and pieces on a chessboard are playing by themselves, while records bounce by themselves onto a record player.

In the second category, we see a more grim version of Švankmajer: interested in the writings of one Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher, 1980), in the sinister shapes of the Sedlec catacombs (The Ossuary, 1970); in liminal and sinister spaces, mostly shot in black and white.

Of all of these shorts, A Quiet Week in the House (1970) made the strongest impression on me: juggling between monochrome – a strange man disguised in camouflage takes refuge in a deserted mansion, sleeping in its hallways and punching holes in its doors to peer into the oddities happening in its rooms – and color – in which the mansion’s furniture and derelict objects mutually destroy each other. One might initially believe that this is one of his most abstract titles – but, in fact, the film is a nihilistic parable about the brutal suppression of Czechoslovakia’s liberalization movement after the Warsaw Pact invasion. It’s almost unbelievable that a film like this could be made in such an oppressive environment, with its ever-so-clear metaphors – a writing machine whose keyboard is invaded by rusted nails, a mechanical toy that breaks free only to be assaulted with heaps of mud, a bouquet of flowers that wilts bursts into flame after its water is sucked away.

Foco Silvestre: working images

The second retrospective that I closely followed was Foco Silvestre: a yearly fixture of the festival, which, at this year’s edition, was dedicated to the subject of work and labor unions, thus anticipating the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. In the end, the very genesis of cinema is deeply tied to the images of workers and factories – see the Factories and the Workers in Motion program, which was composed strictly out of films inspired by Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory, including films by Harun Farocki and Ben Russel –; and the section’s curatorial line was deeply related to the historical representation of work in Portuguese cinema.

In Labour and Workforce, composed of four short films that were recently restored by the Cinematheque’s laboratories, we see four decades of films representing the Portuguese fishing trade: from A Almadraba Atuneira (dir. Antonio Campos, 1961), a literal symphony dedicated to the tuna fishers in Algrave, to Leixoes (dir. Carneiro Mendes, 1933), an exploration of the eponymous port and its industries. An anthropological film that is suddenly pierced by an incredibly poetic shot: in the midst of all these images of lines of fishermen carrying heavy nets, or pulling their boats to the shore, of women sorting and eviscerating the day’s capture, we see a small child playing in the sand, profiled against the harsh light of the sun in a contre-jour shot, his hand finally raising to reveal a struggling crab – the naive games of a child, anticipating a life of infernally difficult and exhausting work.

Finally, the retrospective also put forward an offer that was unmissable – in its Occupation: Work program: the chance to see a rare documentary short directed by Portuguese master Manoel de Olivera, The Bread (O Pao, 1963). Few directors in the history of cinema could turn films that were commissioned by state industries (in this case, of the Portuguese Milling Federation) into works that could stand on their own, fully surpassing the functional, primitive aims of the commission. And who other than Manoel de Olivera could chronicle the life span of bread from grain to hand, who other to transform the cold, repetitive images in a bread factory into a harmonious mechanism, animated by svelte movements and bright colors?

Eugene Greene: present continuous

Speaking of very good occasions in a Portuguese (cinephile) context, there are few better ones to end the festival than by attending a screening of Eugene Green’s Le Mur des Morts, presented in a double feature with Ou en etes vous, Tsai Ming-Liang? (a film commissioned by the Pompidou Foundation during the lockdown; a highly self-referential work, that might come across as a little bit sterile even for the most hardcore fans of Ming-liang).

Greene is a filmmaker that has been adopted by Europe – born in the United States, now half-French, half-Portuguese: see his excellent films set in Lisbon – The Portuguese Nun (2009) and the fantastical How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal (2018). Even if this latest film is set in France, any occasion to see a film made by this master of an increasingly rare art – a fragile blend between Romanticism and Brechtianism – on the big screen is not one to be missed: it’s exactly where his trademark style of shot-countershot montage, based on actors staring deeply and intently into the camera, becomes like somewhat of a hypnotic experience,

The premise is typically Green-esque – a strange encounter, often supernatural encounter between a protagonist facing a choice or a certain state of indecision, and a character who is their double: in this case, a young French man (Arnaud) who, in the midst of a depressive episode, is increasingly captivated by the history of the soldiers that fell during the First World War, and the phantom of such a soldier, who left behind a fiancee, an elderly grandmother, and a younger, orphaned brother.

To be fair, Le Mur… is maybe not Green’s best offering (it’s relatively didactic in its idea of bringing the sacrifice of past generations back into the present, with the purpose of discussing the meaning of peace), but there are two amazing highlights to it. First: Françoise Lebrun as the grandmother – with her incredible on-screen physicality, staring into the camera with a type of calmness that is both implacable and touching, especially when she disarmingly announces “I will die soon”, a message that is wielded like a double-edged sword (within the film’s diegesis, but also as a larger reference to a cinematic era that is fading away). Second: the film’s larger philosophical frame, inspired by Saint Augustine’s writings on the nature of time – and cinema is precisely the medium to transpose his ideas of a synchronous time, of a continuous present. A craftsman that practices a cinema that is apparently simple, yet fundamentally complex and multi-layered like Green, is the one who understands it best.

To conclude: IndieLisboa is doubtlessly a cinephile’s delight – a festival that has the rare merit of being both expansive and relaxed, unpretentious at the same time; of being both comprehensive in terms of both current cinema and of historical works (both local and universal). And that makes it earn a well-deserved spot on the “must-attend” festival map of any cinephile.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.