IndieLisboa Lab is a mentoring workshop for film and audiovisual projects, created within the IndieLisboa Festival in partnership with Project Paradiso, which in 2026 will once again provide a stage for new film talent.
This film writing lab is led by Fernanda Polacow and focuses on the development of projects with non-normative characters, seeking to foster dialogue around inclusion and representation in cinema.
The selected projects for IndieLisboa Lab 2026 are:
Ana Baldini e Roly Witherow
Gil Vicente, The Frog and The Ass
Synopsis
An eccentric group lives amid dark fantasies and repressed desires until they are transported to an alternate Vincentian reality.
Gabriela Giffoni
Strange, Strange, Strange
Synopsis
In Lisbon, three women—linked by past and present romantic relationships—try to realize their artistic projects while facing precarious jobs, financial difficulties, and relationship issues. A film about romantic misadventures strained by contemporary job insecurity.
Diogo Gazella de Carvalho
Estar Habituado é Amar
Synopsis
Eliseu has never known intimacy, but he has grown accustomed to loving in silence the dolls he has built for himself.
Victor Hugooli
25mg
Synopsis
Márcia, a single mother, caregiver for the elderly, and Brazilian immigrant, finds herself in a complicated situation: after one of the elderly people she cared for dies, it becomes difficult to pay the rent, and she sees clinical trials as a temporary solution.
Clara Jost
Still-moving
Synopses
A young couple, forced to move due to the housing crisis, discovers a community that preserves the spirit of association with which it built its neighborhood fifty years earlier. With the memories of its inhabitants, some ghosts emerge.
Matilde Albuquerque
Ponte das Barcas
Synopses
Joana, a 16-year-old teenager, observes her grandmother’s nightly rituals, lighting candles for the souls of a tragedy that took place over two hundred years ago, during the French Invasions. Between the present and the past, war and collective memory, Ponte das Barcas reveals itself as a spiritual connection between generations and a legacy of female survival.
Thalita Rubio (Paradiso Scholarship Project)
Melhor não Contar
Synopses
A reunion with her former stepfather leads a woman to confront childhood memories, revisit her intense relationship with her mother, and rethink a secret that has haunted her for years. Is it really better not to tell?
Ariel Añez
E talvez nunca me vou recordar
Synopses
On the brink of death, an elderly man is taken back to the night of his childhood, when he witnessed his father perform a ritual that connected life and death.