Memory is fragile, but cinema helps to remember. In Freedom Day, or the beginning of everything, we leave you with 5 film suggestions for this next IndieLisboa. Films that do not only preserve a certain reality, but that are built to discuss its past, present and possible future consequences. Stories of pain and sorrow, that seek to understand what will forever be unreasonable, but that remind us that in unity lies hope.
Being free has no borders. Long live the revolution!
From the International Competition, I Am Trying to Remember, by Pegah Ahangarani. An exercise of recollection of fragmented memories, built from images of the director’s family archive. A poetic narrative that starts from a first love, to gradually reveal the thousands of people secretly sentenced and killed, ten years after the Iranian Revolution. Through the eyes of a child who, without understanding what is happening, feels the absence of dear ones and suspects that something very wrong may have happened. A short film that searches for answers to a question that could not be silenced.
From Iran to Russia, How to Save a Dead Friend, the first feature film by Marusya Syroechkovskaya. The Moscow-born director documented for a decade what it means to live repressed by an autocratic regime. When Marusya starts recording, she is only 16 years old, but like so many others of her age, she is determined to put an end to her own life. A portrait of a silenced generation, but also a crack through which we get a glimpse into early 21st century Russia.
The Silvestre section takes us to South America. Camuflage, by Jonathan Perel, does not let us forget the marks of the Argentine dictatorship. An adaptation of the book Campo de Mayo, by Felix Bruzzone, which makes the writer its protagonist. Felix’s mother disappeared in 1976, having been seen for the last time precisely in Campo de Mayo, one of the main clandestine detention centres. Perel follows Bruzzone who is determined to find someone to help him explore this place that is today one of the largest military units in the country.
Nadir Medina also tells us about the Argentine dictatorship, but through a fiction set in the city of Córdoba. The Desobedient tells the story of Alicia, a bus driver who joins an insurrection against an oppressive regime. A film that echoes the Cordobazo, the popular rebellion that opposed the military dictatorship of Juan Carlos Ongania at the end of May 1969, and that was fundamental in triggering other resistance movements, putting pressure on the regime until the 1970 coup d’état.
Margarida Cardoso rescues Sita Valles from the margins, bringing to light a forgotten figure of our recent history. Activist, anti-fascist revolutionary, Sita came from Angola to Portugal to study medicine, and ended up becoming a militant of the Portuguese Communist Party. After the April Revolution, she returned to Africa with the intention of contributing to the Angolan liberation movement. She died at the age of 26, in 1977, under circumstances not yet fully undersrtood. SITA – The Life and Times of Sita Valles is presented in a special screening, followed by a debate with Marta Lança as moderator.
Check the complete programme in the digital magazine.
From April 28th to May 8th, the 19th edition of IndieLisboa – International Film Festival will take place at Cinema São Jorge Cinema, Culturgest, Cinemateca Portuguesa, Cinema Ideal and Biblioteca Palácio Galveias.
