29 APRIL — 09 MAY 2027

INDIELISBOA 2026

IndieMusic
IndieLisboa 2026

The Blind Couple From Mali

For a long time now, Amadou & Mariam have travelled from Bamako to the wider world. This film follows their journey across different geographies and places where they gather musical ideas and weave them into their instruments. The final stop is a major concert in Mali and one last album — a film that brings us within inches of their creative process while also featuring testimonies from some of their closest collaborators: Damon Albarn, Chris Martin, Manu Chao, Tiken Jah Fakoly and Vieux Farka Touré.
Ryan Marley
Canada

2025, 82'

Rhizome
IndieLisboa 2026

The Blood Countess

Long thought to have vanished, the relentless Countess Báthory is forced to abandon the calm of the shadows. In present-day Vienna, she joins forces with her subordinate Hermine and her nephew Rudi Bubi, a vegetarian vampire. In that city, on a journey of baroque exuberance and lurking fangs, they relentlessly search for the whereabouts of a book capable of extinguishing all evil in the universe — something that, truth be told, would not suit them at all. A film by Ulrike Ottinger, starring Isabelle Huppert.
Ulrike Ottinger
Austria / Luxembourg / Germany

2026, 119'

National Competition
IndieLisboa 2026

The Brave

A woman and a man on vacation in Pico Island, in the Azores. The adversities of this journey, set in constantly changing nature, trigger arguments that conceal deeper issues within the characters and their difficulty in connecting.
Catarina Mourão
Portugal

2026, 22'

IndieJúnior
IndieLisboa 2026

The carnival of the animals

It’s Carnival, and at school there’s a parade to choose the best mask. This is a portrait of a Romani family in which a mother prepares her two daughters for the big event: Amanda, the youngest, fears that things might not go as planned.
Emily Barbelin
France

2026, 12'

IndieMusic
IndieLisboa 2026

The Circular Universe – Jocy de Oliveira

Few artists can claim the historical significance of Jocy de Oliveira. A pioneer of electronic music in Brazil — carrying a weight comparable to such towering figures as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen — she was also a brilliant pianist, performing as a soloist under the direction of Igor Stravinsky. In his film, Dácio Pinheiro gathers her legacy while keeping a clear gaze on the present — a time in which the Brazilian composer, now 90 years old, continues to create experimental opera.
Dácio Pinheiro
Brazil / Germany

2026, 86'

Retrospective
Mockumentary Retrospective
IndieLisboa 2026

The Connection

While the dealer hasn’t arrived, eight jazz musicians nurse their hangovers and play. An awkward filmmaker records what he imagines to be an honest testimony of a small human collective cramped inside a New York apartment. The feature debut of Shirley Clarke, a key figure in the independent cinema of the second half of the twentieth century, is based on Jack Gelber’s play of the same name and repeatedly asserts its distance from reality. 
Shirley Clarke
United States

1961, 110'

Smart7
IndieLisboa 2026

The Dashed Lines

Bea, a 50-year-old woman on the verge of divorce, calls the emergency line to report a break-in at her home. Denís, a 25-year-old trans man—adrift between precarious work and the pull of nightlife—is still there. What begins as a scare soon gives way to curiosity, and the weekend unfolds as an unexpected journey of mutual discovery.
Anxos Fazáns
Spain

2025, 90'

International Competition
IndieLisboa 2026

The Death of the Fish

When the fish dies, the mother’s depression breaks the surface. The daughter dances to keep the world afloat.
Eva Lusbaronian
France

2025, 14'

Rhizome
IndieLisboa 2026

The Education of Jane Cumming

An unlikely family is born. In nineteenth-century Edinburgh, two schoolteachers open a boarding school, dreaming of laying the foundations for an independent life together. Soon after, an aristocrat decides to enrol her “illegitimate” fifteen-year-old granddaughter, and the newly built world of Miss Pirie and Miss Woods begins to crack — especially when the grandmother suggests that Jane should spend the summer there as well. The school year resumes, and everything spills over. 
Sophie Heldman
Germany / Switzerland / United Kingdom

2026, 114'

IndieJúnior
IndieLisboa 2026

The Emancipation of Mimi

Miguel is 9 years old and obsessed with singer Mariah Carey. He goes to a Catholic school and one day his class is challenged by the nuns to sell calendars of the Virgin Mary. When he finds out that he won’t be able to keep the profits from the calendar sales like he thought, he decides to take action. After all, his favorite singer is coming to perform in his town, just like a miracle.
Marcelo Pereira
Portugal

2025, 13'

Rhizome
IndieLisboa 2026

The Fence

As far as the eye can see, a vast construction project in West Africa is tightly secured, with its guards, watchtowers and barbed wire. At night, by the fence, a man makes himself known: he tells the British contractor that he has come to retrieve the body of his brother, who died there just hours earlier. Claire Denis returns to IndieLisboa with an adaptation of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s masterful play Black Battles with Dogs.
Claire Denis
France

2025, 95'

Smart7
IndieLisboa 2026

The Fires

Iceland’s icy beauty conceals a turmoil of lava. Earthquakes are becoming increasingly frequent, and Anna, Iceland’s leading volcanologist, fears the worst: a volcanic eruption is approaching that could destroy Reykjavík, yet no one seems to take her seriously. But this is not the only upheaval she faces: a Danish photographer enters her life, complicating her marriage and putting her family at risk. The Fires is based on a popular Icelandic novel and replicated the book’s success at the country’s box office.
Ugla Hauksdóttir
Iceland / Poland / United Kingdom

2025, 107'

Retrospective
Mockumentary Retrospective
IndieLisboa 2026

The Girl Chewing Gum

A great idea is not necessarily an intricate web or a complex labyrinth — a great idea is one that works. Here it is, courtesy of John Smith, who in 1976 premiered a film that answers a desire we all share: what if a sentence could trigger an action in a person and/or an object? The Girl Chewing Gum is precisely that — the voice of the British filmmaker seemingly commanding the fate of a busy London street.
John Smith
United Kingdom

1976, 12'

Opening and Closing
IndieLisboa 2026

The History of Concrete

The absurd, the unusual, but also the tedious and the banal — anything can become a film. Why shouldn’t concrete, a kind of antithesis to colour, imagination and ideas, be fertile ground? John Wilson, a comedian best known for the series How To with John Wilson, makes his feature-length debut with a bold premise: after attending a Hallmark workshop on how to write and sell a television romantic comedy, he decides to replicate the strategy in a documentary about concrete. John Wilson in attendance.
John Wilson
United States

2026, 101'

International Competition
IndieLisboa 2026

The Hunter

Metal detector in hand, the Hunter roams through forest and city in search of treasure. It is his way of life, his calling: the summons of Lord Gold. Along the way, however, he finds everything; his home resembles a museum, or a shop filled with objects rescued from anonymity.
Luciana Riso, Manuel Villa
Colombia

2026, 13'

International Competition
IndieLisboa 2026

The Inner Ear

Lorenzo’s ear feels different. It was after a boat accident that the ringing began — and never left — growing louder and more insistent, seeping into the fabric of his everyday life. Through medical appointments and less conventional therapies, this is his search for relief — for something that might restore silence.
Rafael Federman
Argentina

2026, 18'

National Competition
IndieLisboa 2026

The Intruder

The Intruder is a video essay rooted in the experience of a heart surgery. Inspired by texts by Jean-Luc Nancy and María Zambrano, it superimposes clinical, personal, and emotional images to form a dense visual archive. Accumulation and rhythm shape a non-linear narrative in which memory, body, and time are reconfigured through voice and heartbeat.
João Paulo Serafim
Portugal

2026, 14'

IndieJúnior
IndieLisboa 2026

The Light is Big

First we giggle. Then we repeat syllables and words. Until something magical happens: we combine them and create something new. No longer just imitating, we begin to say something about the world around us. These are our first sentences, precious and unrepeatable. Based on the book of the same name, this short film brings together sentences that were spoken for the very first time.
Markus Duffner
Portugal

2025, 5'

Opening and Closing
IndieLisboa 2026

The Loneliest Man in Town

After all, what remains beyond the records and the books? What is left beyond the debris of the people we once were — and wished to be? Al Cook is a man alone, a blues musician frozen in time and, soon enough, lost in space. An aggressive real estate company wants to demolish his house, and the memories through which he lives are now at risk. What melody remains for him then? The Italian-Austrian duo Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel return to the festival after winning the Distribution Award in 2010 with La Pivellina. 
Rainer Frimmel, Tizza Covi
Austria

2026, 86'

National Competition
IndieLisboa 2026

The Loneliness of Lizards

In a spa surrounded by mountains of salt, guests relax and sunbathe, while workers collect the glowing crystals under the sun. Children run off, escaping the watchful eyes of adults, and a woman drifts through this landscape in a haze, detached from reality. As night falls, the space transforms, shaped by the desires of those who pass through. 
Inês Nunes
Portugal / Spain

2025, 15'

Rhizome
IndieLisboa 2026

The Old Salazar

On the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, I made a documentary about Álvaro Cunhal. Now, on the centenary of the 1926 military coup, it seemed only fitting to make one about Salazar. Conceived as a diptych, the film brings together figures such as the housekeeper, the cardinal, the minister of propaganda, the nurse, and the shoeshiner, who—through their memories—recount stories we all believed had not been forgotten.
João Botelho
Portugal

2026, 60'

IndieJúnior
IndieLisboa 2026

The Other Planet

The Red Planet is under attack. Its inhabitants are forced to leave. They land on the Blue Planet, where people are not particularly welcoming…
10 Children
Belgium

2023, 6'

International Competition
IndieLisboa 2026

The Plant From The Canaries

Only the city remains—only it is capable of holding her. After an unexpected breakup, May, a Korean woman living in Berlin, searches for signs of healing as she wanders through streets and gardens. At every corner, she is carried back to her Seoul, a jumble of times and places and a lingering sense of not belonging. It is within a new routine, in the mundanity of everyday life—nights of clementines on the sofa, dance classes—that May keeps going.
Lan-Xi Ruan
Germany

2025, 66'

Director’s Cut
IndieLisboa 2026

The Red Spectacles

The Red Spectacles is the first installment of the “Kerberos Saga”, a trilogy conceived by Mamoru Oshii — best known for his work in animation, particularly Ghost in the Shell (1995) — imagining a Tokyo dominated by a Nazi Germany that emerged victorious from World War II. Kōichi Todome is a former officer of Kerberos, a paramilitary unit clad in seemingly invincible exoskeleton armor, who returns to his country’s capital only to find it in an even darker state than when he left. A noir classic presented in a new 4K restoration. 
Mamoru Oshii
Japan

1987, 116'

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