IndieLisboa 2025 — IndieLisboa

29 APRIL — 09 MAY 2027

INDIELISBOA 2025

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IndieLisboa 2025

Beyond Clueless

A film with DIY origins that premiered at the SXSW festival in 2014, featuring a collection of scenes from teen movies, particularly from 1995 and 2004 — the title is a reference to Clueless, the successful 1990s teen movie with Alicia Silverstone that adapts Jane Austen to the American high school. The narration is by Fairuza Balk, the protagonist of The Craft, and includes an original soundtrack by the British duo Summer Camp.

Charlie Shackleton

2014, 89'

National Competition

IndieLisboa 2025

Black Hole Descending

You are about to die.Your death rite of choice is Celestial Bridging.In Black Hole Descending the boundaries between life and death blur as this obscure ritual unfolds.

Portugal / Germany

2025, 10'

IndieLisboa 2025

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

Kahlil Joseph is best known for his work on Beyoncé’s music film Lemonade. Now he’s making his feature debut with BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, a film that draws inspiration from everywhere: it’s Afro-futuristic fiction, an archival investigation, a multimedia work, an intimate and personal story and an exploration of the collective memory of the Black diaspora. It’s an ambitious and audacious project, which maintains its connection with music and video installation.

United States / Ghana

2025, 113'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2025

bluish

Sometimes being in your twenties means not having a clear direction in your life and that’s what happens to Errol and Sasha. We see their day-to-day lives unfold in fragments, we see who they are with, what they do, and how they intertwine. But bluish is about this condition of ambiguity in which everything is still possible, not all the choices have been made yet.

Lilith Kraxner, Milena Czernovsky

2024, 83'

IndieLisboa 2025

Bobel’s Kitchen

Bobel is a mushroom, and a poisonous one at that. But that doesn’t stop him from dreaming of becoming a cook in his village — not that the locals are as keen.

2024, 10'

Mouth of Madness

IndieLisboa 2025

Bring Them Down

Christopher Andrews writes and directs a film about generational trauma, the baggage of toxic masculinity, what we do when we feel the weight of responsibility, or when we just make the wrong choices at every turn. Two shepherd families with petty rivalries find themselves on a collision course where every gesture escalates the situation. With Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott.

Christopher Andrews

Belgium / Ireland / United Kingdom

2024, 105'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2025

Brought with the Storm

A film about surviving something that didn’t go as expected. Manuel is going through a break-up with Camila, and, at the same time, he has to rethink the whole artistic project that has been his focus for the last few years. To give Camila space to pack, he leaves for a seaside location, where he continues his preoccupation with recording sounds of all kinds. His inertia about the future will be challenged by something extraordinary that happens to him on the beach.

Miguel de Zuviría

2025, 119'

Mouth of Madness

IndieLisboa 2025

Cadet

Adilkhan Yerzhanov had his brilliant Steppenwolf at last year’s IndieLisboa and now returns with Cadet, with this film being a gesture that changes the pace from the dystopian westerns of the director’s past. Also returning is Anna Starchenko, who plays Alina, the mother of Serik, a shy boy who is bullied by his classmates and teachers in a military school where violence haunts every corridor.

Adilkhan Yerzhanov

2024, 127'

Director’s Cut

IndieLisboa 2025

Café Flesh

Restoration of a cult movie set in a post-apocalyptic world, embracing science-fiction ideas, where pornography springs from sexual frustration. This is Café Flesh, where in the aftermath of a nuclear event, 99% of the survivors can’t stand human touch and can’t have sex (the sex negatives). The minority, the sex positives, are placed in a position of entertainment for the rest, an erotic-musical theater. The imminent arrival of sex legend Johnny Rico tests a breaking couple.

Stephen Sayadian

1982, 75'

IndieLisboa 2025

Camera Test (King Cadbury)

The director just wanted to test a new camera and use an expired 16mm film stock. Seeing his crew out of ideas, Charlie Shackleton tells an amusing family story involving a 1963 Cadbury ad.

Charlie Shackleton

2024, 7'

IndieLisboa 2025

Canone effimero

A serene but complex film that begins with an investigation into the craftsmanship of the zampogna, a kind of bagpipe from Calabria, to expand into a more general overview of a series of local traditions, seven to be precise, from various regions of Italy — Calabria, Marche, Liguria and Sicily. A film that speaks of traditions that cross generations, with a delicate and contemporary gaze, so that certain musical expressions of the oral tradition survive.

Gianluca De Serio, Massimiliano De Serio

2024, 121'

IndieLisboa 2025

Casa-Abrigo

Based on true events, we follow Vera, Madalena, Conceição and Gabriela, victims of domestic violence in a shelter. Together, they rediscover their place as they try to gain the independence and security to start their lives anew. Each episode is dedicated to one of the women and also to Joana, the psychologist who works with them. These are personal and unique testimonies of women who are not limited to the dramatic situation in which they find themselves, without ever being able to forget it.

Márcio Laranjeira

2024, 95'

Opening and Closing

IndieLisboa 2025

Caught by the Tides

Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke tells the story of a failed romance that unfolds over 20 years, with an evolving China in the background. But the focus is on Qiao, a singer and dancer who gets involved with a dubious music producer, Bin, who leaves her to try his luck in another city, promising to send for her when he has money. Qiao, waiting, writes to him and, receiving no reply, decides to go searching for Bin. The adventure is not without its perils.

2024, 111'

Mouth of Madness

IndieLisboa 2025

Channelvue

A short film that takes us back to the nostalgic 1990s and the TV guide that accompanied the day’s broadcasts. Here, we follow a very bad day in the life of the CEO of a cable channel who sees her programming attacked by mischievous hackers.

Brandon Tauszik

2024, 8'

IndieLisboa 2025

Cloud

An innocuous beginning: Yoshii has a job that doesn’t satisfy him. What does satisfy him is the adrenaline rush of reselling products online in order to exceed his initial investment. The adrenaline becomes addictive and so does the money. But the film develops into something much more intriguing when his behavior in the digital world begins to have very real consequences in real life and the hostility that would remain in a comment section is taken to its ultimate consequences.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

2024, 123'

IndieLisboa 2025

Copycat

Charlie Shackleton explores a possible vein of inspiration for one of the most successful horror films in American cinema, Wes Craven’s iconic Scream (1996): an obscure film by Rolfe Kanefsky, There’s Nothing Out There, which works in the same metatextual universe that winks at the horror genre.

Charlie Shackleton

United Kingdom / United States

2015, 8'

Director’s Cut

IndieLisboa 2025

Daughters of Darkness

A cult movie from 1971 that plays with the erotic and the terrifying and is now available in a restored format. Based on the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess who killed young women in the 16th and 17th centuries, Hary Kümel co-wrote and directed this film, which is set in a Belgian hotel by the sea, empty because it’s winter. A young newlywed couple (who should have chosen another location) meet a lesbian countess (played by Delphine Seyrig) and her apparent secretary, both shrouded in an air of mystery.

Belgium / France / West Germany

1971, 100'

European Short Film Network

IndieLisboa 2025

DCT:SYPHONING: The 1000000th (64th) Interval

A translation game that takes Edwin Abbott Abbott’s novel Flatland into the world of digital image compression algorithms.

2017, 6'

IndieLisboa 2025

De-sastre

When we move house we want to make it our home. We bring our things, organize everything and the space becomes ours. But as the months go by in her new apartment, Daniela notices that her clothes are beginning to show strange shapes and holes. What could be causing this?

Marolyn Ávila, Tommaso Mangiacotti, Kuang Yi Lee, Constanza Melio, María Antonieta Fernández

2024, 8'

Director’s Cut

IndieLisboa 2025

Different

Presentation of the restored version of this cult but little-seen Spanish film which, despite its homoerotic disruption, slipped through the cracks of Franco’s censorship. Over the years, the film’s rediscovery has affirmed its importance for its contribution to the history of Spanish musicals and its representation of a non-normative sexuality. In Different, we follow Alfredo, a bon vivant who rejects the precepts of his wealthy family at the same time as they reject him. A eulogy to the pleasures of queer extravagance.

Luis María Delgado

1962, 102'

International Competition

IndieLisboa 2025

Downriver a Tiger

For Júlia, life in Glasgow is a way of starting fresh, of creating something that is hers alone, without interference from her family, from those she knows, from her history so far. But her brother, in Barcelona, wants to maintain the bridge that unites them. And bridges are Julia’s favorite thing to photograph, until her eyesight begins to fail.

2025, 75'

IndieLisboa 2025

Drowning Dry

Two sisters, Ernesta and Justė, go with their husbands and children to a lake house for a weekend away. The differences between their marriages, and their relationships with their children, are highlighted over the course of the days. Until a traumatic event occurs and it’s the beginning of something that will mark the family forever. This Lithuanian drama is told in a series of flashbacks, revealing its layers.

Laurynas Bareiša

Lithuania / Latvia

2024, 88'

IndieLisboa 2025

Ecstasy

In the path between the house and the church, doubt has settled. Clinging to the faint memory of the faith that once was certain, a nun repeats barren and mechanical rituals, hoping for different outcomes. In her involuntary penitence, risking the profane, she seems to fear both the abyss of mourning and the luminous power of ecstasy.

2025, 19'

Mouth of Madness

IndieLisboa 2025

El tema del verano

Ana, Malú and Martina already have a strategy in place: find some rich guys, seduce them, put them to sleep and steal their money. And as in other stories like this, they only have one last job to do. The target is an eccentric millionaire who manages cryptocurrencies. The plan goes wrong, the dosages are miscalculated and they discover that being alive is not necessarily the opposite of being dead. But being dead is perhaps the best time to discover love.

Argentina / Chile / Uruguay

2024, 91'