IndieLisboa 2023 — IndieLisboa

29 APRIL — 09 MAY 2027

INDIELISBOA 2023

Filters

Filters

IndieLisboa 2023

Resumption of Work at the Wonder Factory

Amid a sour return to work, which does not feel like a workers’ victory, a quiet voice of disruption tries to shake the passive return to the status quo.

Pierre Bonneau, Liane Estiez-Willemont, Jacques Willemont

1968, 10'

IndieLisboa 2023

Roads of Lava

Afibola is an afrofeminist and queer Cuban activist, yet her son, Olorun, must unlearn daily most of what he is taught in school. Afibola and her community try to teach Olorun how to grow up to be a free black person, despite the obstacles around them.

2022, 28'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2023

Rodeo

Motorbikes are the new horses and not exactly legal motocross races and stunts are the new rodeos. In this film, Julie Ledru is Julia, a woman with a hard shell and no fear, marked by her passion for motorcycles, their speed, and the feeling of freedom they provide. But the ultra-masculine world of the Paris suburbs that Julia wants to inhabit requires increasingly risky tests and her place in this community is not an easy one to secure.

2022, 106'

National Competition

IndieLisboa 2023

Rosinha and Other Wild Animals

A film that scrutinizes the idea of “soft racism” and how it comes to drink from the exalted Portuguese colonialism. The titular Rosinha is a Guinean native who became the symbol of the first Portuguese colonial exhibition presented by the Estado Novo in 1934. A trip to the past to better understand the present.

2023, 101'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2023

Rough red

At a time when Brazil was becoming a democracy (1985-1995), four women — Jô, Eunice, Alessa and Fabiana — became mothers while still in their teens. Political evolution and the abrupt entry into adulthood and motherhood are mixed in a film that shows their domestic space, built from personal archives, as well as contemporary images, filmed by the protagonists in 2018, during the election campaign of Jair Bolsonaro.

Amanda Devulsky

2022, 205'

IndieLisboa 2023

Rubab

A film that proposes to show a slice of life of students that came from the only music school in Kabul (Afghanistan), who took refuge in Lisbon after the prohibition of music by the Taliban regime. One hundred students were thus received at the National Conservatory.

2023, 18'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2023

Runaway

A family owns a cafe (a building that is also their home) where they end up being forced to shelter a man on the run from justice. The ten-year-old son tries to deal with the changing dynamics in his life.

Salome Kintsurashvili

Georgia / Russia

2022, 25'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2023

Safe Place

A stark, raw portrayal of a tumultuous 24-hour period that throws a small family’s life into disarray. Damir, a man with mental health weakened by depression, tries to commit suicide. His brother (portrayed by the director, in what is an autobiographical work) and mother try to tether him to life, but the systemic protocols Damir is placed in, sterile, impersonal, and devoid of empathy, underline the lack of truly safe spaces.

2022, 102'

IndieLisboa 2023

Saint Omer

COMPETITION Alice Diop enters the world of fiction telling the story of Rama, a professor of literature and novelist who travels to Saint-Omer to accompany a trial, being in the first months of pregnancy. In the defendant’s seat is Lawrence Coly, a Senegalese immigrant student accused of having left his daughter, just over a year old, abandoned on the beach. The kinship Rama feels with Lawrence’s life experience makes her apprehensive about her future.

2022, 122'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2023

Samsara

The concept of the bardo in Buddhism is that of a transitional state, between death and reincarnation. This film is an exploration of that transitional space, that liminal moment of transformation. We first follow a teenage monk in Laos who reads to an elderly woman every day to prepare her for her journey to rebirth. When her spirit begins this journey, we join in an experience of light and sound, in which the circle of life is mirrored by that of the cinema.

2023, 113'

National Competition

IndieLisboa 2023

SÚLU S’ÁUA

An exploration of an island dominated by violence and ghosts, where the only solution to return to a peaceful coexistence, between the world of the living and that of the departed, is to settle the debts of the past.

Sao Tome and Principe / Portugal

2023, 30'

IndieLisboa 2023

Scratch

The history of hip-hop in a documentary that goes back to the origins of a musical genre that started with DJs experimenting on vinyl and became much more than that. From the initial elements, through the introduction of MCs, the battles and the creation of beats, this is a new world created by unexpected virtuosos.

2001, 91'

Mouth of Madness

IndieLisboa 2023

Shin Ultraman

The beloved Japanese character Ultraman from the 1960s (“shin” means new) is reactivated in this film adaptation by the hands of Shin Godzilla’s creators, Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion), another successful adaptation of iconic Japanese characters. They took the aesthetics of past monster movies with a modern patina and inserted ruminations about politics and human existence, in a film that has merciless fun with the humanoid hero.

2022, 112'

Mouth of Madness

IndieLisboa 2023

Sick of Myself

Perhaps the most cringe comedy one can see, even bordering on the limits of what a comedy is, but with a perfect distillation of Scandinavian humour, in a venomous (in more ways than one) satire of Signe, a character with a competitive (and pathological) need to attract attention and sympathy. And as her boyfriend, Thomas, gains fame as an artist, the more her plans become delusional.

Kristoffer Borgli

Norway / Sweden

2022, 95'

IndieLisboa 2023

Slaughterhouses of Modernity

OUT OF COMPETITION An aficionado of modern architecture, Heinz Emigholz travels through Argentina, Bolivia and Germany – from the slaughterhouses by Salamone in countryside Argentina to the Humboldt Forum in Berlin – to investigate the existence, or absence, of common spaces, underlining the inexorable link between city spaces and buildings with the advance of capitalist ideology.

2022, 80'

IndieLisboa 2023

Sleepwalkers

When the world becomes perfectly automated what is human labor for? Nourishment to the industry itself.

2014, 22'

Mouth of Madness

IndieLisboa 2023

Smoking Causes Coughing

Any connection to the Power Rangers is no coincidence, but in this delicious and slightly sickening spoof the tone is decidedly French, and our troupe of heroes’ powers are all tied to the harmful chemicals in tobacco. After a victorious fight, they go on a team retreat and entertain themselves by telling horror stories by the light of the campfire. The end of the world, however, does not wait for anyone’s retreat.

Quentin Dupieux

2022, 80'

European Short Film Network

IndieLisboa 2023

so stones talk talk talk

Trying to hear the conversations stones might have on a deserted beach in Oporto, on a day like any other, in April 2022.

Simon Dallaserra

2022, 2'

Mouth of Madness

IndieLisboa 2023

Soft & Quiet

“Far-Right Ladies Night”, “Neo-Nazi Karens Are Your Worst Nightmare”: some of the review titles for this disturbingly immersive one-shot film about the horror that hides in everyday life. Soft and Quiet holds the viewer’s hand firmly and makes us grasp a dark side of humanity. Between warning and shock, a film about the potential and dire consequences of a white supremacist mentality.

Beth de Araújo

2022, 91'

Special Screenings

IndieLisboa 2023

Solmatalua

A poetic essay that re-imagines an odyssey of the African diaspora that moves away from the white hands that wrote the stories of these lands and puts, rather, the focus on the stories of those who couldn’t tell their own History. A film that is the creation of an impressionist story (through dance, archival footage, performances) that moves away from traditional reconstruction.

Rodrigo Ribeiro Andrade

2022, 15'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2023

Something You Said Last Night

A family vacation at a resort where the activities are designed either for the older or the younger, and Ren in her mid-twenties, her desire to be a writer and having just been fired not being able to entertain her. Between keeping secrets, hers and her sister’s, and putting up with parents who are overly happy, but with a sometimes-sharp tongue, this is not your typical story about a trans girl and her relationship with her family.

Luis De Filippis

Canada / Switzerland

2022, 96'

IndieLisboa 2023

Somni

When it’s time to sleep and we close our eyes, what do we see with our imagination when we enter the realm of dreams?

2023, 3'

European Short Film Network

IndieLisboa 2023

Sonnenfilm

The horizon of both sunset and sunrise touch and move away, existing, only in cinema, simultaneously.

Antonia de la Luz Kasik

Austria / Spain

2022, 17'

IndieLisboa 2023

Spin & Ella

A fairy and a spider having fun weaving designs with sticky thread and a magic wand. The drawings keep changing, the experiences advancing, until they get annoyed with each other.

2023, 7'