To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April, IndieLisboa presents this year, in Silvestre Focus, 5 programmes of films dedicated to labour and the trade union movement. In this Freedom Day, we suggest 5 films not to be missed. Films that do not let the reality of dictatorial Portugal fall into oblivion and that remind us that resistance needs to happen every day.
Right on April 27, we present a programme on Decent Work. With precariousness as its central axis, these films show us that the group of the badly employed is everywhere, and that it is one of the greatest forces of the labour movement. True stories, even when in fiction, of those who try to survive in a capitalist society where the person is stripped of their human identity. The screening that will take place at Cinema São Jorge, at 9:45 pm, includes the Portuguese short film The Left Behind, that tells us about Otília, a woman condemned to balance work commitments with domestic work and informal caregiving.
The Factories and the Workers in Motion is an essay-play about working people and factories. It starts from one of the first films in the history of cinema, La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, by the Lumière brothers, and draws on a number of other works from many years later, in which we continue to see people leaving their factories, places of oppression, but also of resistance. A short documentary from ’68, Resumption of Work at the Wonder Factory, gives us a disruptive voice that reminds us that the struggle is a continuous act. To be watched on the April 28, at 9:45 pm, at Culturgest.
The programme Work Tools proposes an evocation of the different meanings that the word tool has had in the world of work over the years, from instrument to instrumentalisation. Agrilogistics, for example, an experimental documentary from 2022, analyses the most recent technological transformations in contemporary agriculture, exploring life in an almost industrial greenhouse, where it’s the machines that check and select Nature, although they don’t know how to take care of themselves. The screening will take place on May 1, 5:45 pm, at Cinema Ideal.
Invited by IndieLisboa, the FILMar project has joined this celebration and created the program Labour and Workforce. Without distorting the project’s motto, this screening presents a look at the work connected to the sea in the Portuguese context. Besides a set of documentary short films, A Canção da Terra, by Jorge Brum do Canto, will also be presented. This is a love story that also allows us to get to know the real living conditions in 1930’s Portugal. Also to be watched on the 1st of May, at 9:30, at Cinema São Jorge.
Made up entirely of Portuguese cinema, the screening Occupation: Work builds a journey through the way in which the latter has been represented in national cinema, from the 1930s to the present day. Among the short films chosen, Abi Feijó tells us about the bitter soul and the obedient body of these people who live in the tail of Europe. This Fado Lusitano, a satirical portrait of the history of Portugal from the time of what they came to call the maritime expansion, will be screened at Cinemateca Portuguesa, at 7:30 pm, on May 4.
Regarding this Silvestre Focus, we will meet at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, on the 3rd of May, at 6:00 pm, with Daniel Carapau, Luísa Veloso and Manuel Carvalho da Silva, in a conversation moderated by Giulia Stripolli, in the scope of LisbonTalks by NOVA FCSH. For more information, please visit the activity’s page.
