Between May 23rd and June 2nd, IndieLisboa will fill the city of Lisbon with the latest releases and news from national and international contemporary cinema.
The festival will once again occupy the main cinemas in Lisbon (São Jorge, Culturgest, Cinemateca Portuguesa, Ideal, Fernando Lopes), spreading to gardens, swimming pools, universities and other places and with more surprises to be revealed soon!
For now, we reveal some of what will happen in three of the festival’s sections: IndieMusic, Mouth of Madness and Smart7.
For a closer look at the teen spirit, IndieMusic presents two contemporary international icons who, at the same time as they reinvent musical styles, assume queer positions in these same musical contexts. This Excessive Ambition takes us to the world of melancholic flamenco pop of C Tangana and Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero shows us hardcore hip hop in punk and queer pink.
Also noteworthy is the presence of Portuguese films that recover artists and musical styles produced in Portugal. One of these examples is the documentary film As Fado Bicha, by the famous duo with this same name, who subscribe to a politically implicated queer fado musical style.
We also travel through the world of Portuguese musical experimentalism, highlighting the multifaceted artist Ricardo Martins with the short film Ricardo Martins: Ressonate, which explores the creative process of his latest album and delves into the national production of experimental and exploratory music, getting to know the main entities that mark these avant-garde movements.
Still exploring the Portuguese musical scene we present Sur La Stre Nuro, Na Corda Bamba, an artistic partnership with names such as Adriana Sá, Joana Sá, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, VON CALHAU!, Rafael Toral. Finally, Yours Truly, Fear is a short film about the band 5ª Punkada a group of disabled artists who use music as a vehicle to “make noise” in society.
We continue through the acceleration of punk, post-hardcore and rock, and we recover bands that marked the 80s and 90s through the screening of We are Fugazi from Washington DC, made from archive images of their fans and which captures the raw energy and wild character of his concerts, and of Mutiny In Heaven: The Birthday Party, a film that focuses on the post-punk beginnings of Nick Cave’s career.
Still, and with greater fanfare, Louder Than You Think pursues and delves into the work and life of Pavement’s tempestuous and intense drummer. We return to the classics with the documentary June, which pays homage to the talent of musician and singer June, generally known for her partnership and marriage with Johnny Cash.
We then dive epically into the life and story of singer-songwriter Paul Simon in In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon. And finally, the most divergent film within the section is Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, an investigative documentary set to jazz rhythms to explain the political context of the Congo independence movement.
IndieMusic is also preparing a special program to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April: Song, Intervention and Revolution. The highlight goes to the film 25 Canções de Abril, with the premiere of a copy that results from 4K scanning carried out by Cinemateca Portuguesa from a 16mm period copy. This is a rare opportunity to see a recording of the show held at the Porto Coliseum in 1977, which brought together an important cast of singers, poets and composers, including Adriano Correia de Oliveira, José Carlos Ary dos Santos or Carlos Paredes.
This section will also feature Mama Africa, about the life of singer and activist Miriam Makeba, a fundamental voice in the independence movements of African colonies, in the fight against racism and poverty and for the promotion of justice and peace.
We also want to spread the word about one of our most beloved sections: Mouth of Madness, which has the support of FILMIN for this year’s edition of one of the festival’s most challenging and exciting programs.
Mouth of Madness brings us the latest horror, thriller, and gore films. However, the programme does not limit itself to horror themes and also expands on humour, cultivating the habituation of a dark, sarcastic and absurd cinephilia.
Of the films already confirmed, we highlight Late Night with the Devil, by Cameron and Colin Cairnes, and Cobweb, by Jee-Woon Kim. The first film takes us to the lost recording of a Halloween episode of a 1977 talk show, where the interviewees are a parapsychologist and a girl who appears to be the only survivor of a mass suicide at a satanic church. Within the theme, the second film brings us a comedy about a director (played by Song Kang-Ho, the protagonist of Parasite) who decides to imprison the censors of his film until he manages to make his masterpiece.
Rotting in the Sun, by Sebastián Silva, is a comedy that deals with the meeting between the director and a famous actor on a gay beach, until the director disappears, contributing to the escalation of tension within the film’s narrative. The Royal Hotel, by Kitty Green, follows the move and new job of two girls in Australia, exploring their toxic relationship with this new space, as well as with the people who frequent it.
The Empire by Bruno Dumont, sarcastically mixes an invasion of the planet by interstellar forces in a French beach town where nothing out of the ordinary usually happens. Less known to the general public, but with a lot to offer, are the national premieres of Steppenwolf by Adilkhan Yerzhanov (Kazakhstan), which claims a Western Mad Max style, but much rougher and much more violent. There is also the sarcastic comedy The Vourdalak, by Adrien Beau, which is inspired by a short story by Aleksei Tolstoy to bring us a vampire story that presents us with a monster that is a kind of puppet.
Finally, and also worth mentioning, the confirmed short films: Sweet Juices by Will Suen and Sejon Im, Fishmonger by Neil Ferron, Birds Whose Legs Break Off, by Dirk Verschure, Transylvanie, by Rodrigue Huart, and The Lovers, by Carolina Sandvik
The SMART 7 network presents the second edition of a European competition program, the result of collaboration between seven European film festivals supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA program. This network has launched a competitive section that includes seven films by emerging filmmakers from each member country. These films, committed to expanding the limits of narrative and cinematic expression, will be screened at each SMART 7 festival and evaluated by a jury made up of university students from each country. The winning film will receive a prize of 5,000 euros.
This section will travel to the 7 European film festivals throughout 2024, having started last week with the Vilnius International Film Festival (Lithuania), followed by the IndieLisboa International Film Festival, and soon after to the International Film Festival FILMADRID (Spain), for the Transylvanian Film Festival IFF (Romania), for the New Horizons Festival (Poland), for Reykjavik IFF (Iceland) and, finally, in November, the section ends at the International Film Festival of Thessaloniki (Greece) to reveal which SMART7 film won.
Representing Lithuania is Tomas Vengris’ second feature film, Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania, which received the Best Film award in the Rebels with a Cause competition at the Tallinn Black Nights IFF. The story follows five guests who experience a love crisis in an AirBnB in Vilnius without knowing the stories that took place within the same walls and under the same sheets.
From Portugal, and already premiered at the Rotterdam Festival, comes a comedy about a young Brazilian student who needs to renew her residence permit in Portugal: Greice, by Leonardo Mouramateus. Natatorium, by Helena Stefansddottir, is a suspense drama from Iceland, which also had its world premiere in Rotterdam and will soon be shown at the SXSW Film and Music Festival. In this film, we follow teenager Lilja, who visits her estranged grandparents and ends up discovering a dark secret.
The Greek film The Summer with Carmen, by Zacharias Mavroeidis, tells the story of two best friends who remember the events of their last queer beach summer. The title was screened at Mumbai IFF and nominated for the Queer Lion award at Venice IFF. Julia Castro and Maria Royo’s delirious road movie On The Go was chosen by the Spanish FILMADRID. In Locarno, the film won the Special Mention from the jury of young people, captivated by its narrative full of music, where the road and friendship alleviate the disorientation caused to the protagonists by the deceptive freedom of the beginning of the 21st century. It’s Not My Film is a Polish film that will have its world premiere on the Smart7 network. Maria Zbaska’s debut feature film is a humorous story about the fight for love, in which a couple will try to repair a relationship in which not everything is lost. Also premiering is the second feature film by Romanian director duo Gabi Sarga and Catalin Rotaru, Where Elephants Go, where we follow the friendship between a girl with a terminal illness, her mother who juggles her job and a young man with no interest in what life has to offer.
Now, here’s some music to listen to until the next revelation!
