29 APRIL — 09 MAY 2027

29 APRIL — 09 MAY 2027

SEARCH
IndieLisboa 2026
National Competition

FILM

Loose Sleep

Sometimes, the hardest step in a day is the first one. In Loose Sleep, our hero fights a battle against himself: is it worth it to leave the comfort of the duvet and live life outside? By means of a fragmentary narrative, built on dreams and associations, this short film follows the protagonist’s speculation on activity and passivity, the passage of time and the (dis)advantages of being awake.
Rodrigo Soares Teixeira
Portugal / Spain

2026, 7'
IndieLisboa 2026
Opening and Closing

FILM

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'
IndieLisboa 2026
National Competition

FILM

Raw Material

Raw Material was filmed over a year in the Interior Douro region. Through testimonies from local communities, the film reflects on different, at times conflicting, notions of value in relation to the landscape and how practices of cultivation, preservation and extraction benefit and impact the people who live there. A film that explores ideas of what is contained but not immediately visible within the land.
James Newitt
Portugal

2025, 36'
IndieLisboa 2026
Silvestre

FILM

Erupcja

Rob (Will Maiden) and Bethany (Charli XCX) are on holiday in Warsaw, and he carries an engagement ring in his pocket. Doubts soon begin to trouble her, as caring and devoted can also mean dull. The impulse is to run away, to chase after Nel (Lena Gorá), an old Polish friend she had lost touch with and with whom she shares an intense chemistry, to the point that both feel that whenever they are together, a volcano erupts. The IndieDate screening on Saturday, 2 May is hosted by Diogo Faro, followed by a post-screening Q&A to break the ice and spark new connections – powered by a quiz you can answer here. Then it’s on to the iconic Message Party at Purex: messages of friendship or flirtation, your call.
Peter Ohs
United States / Poland

2025, 71'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Holy Destructors

What is it that grows while decomposing other organisms? Microfungi are natural biodestructors, essential to the recycling of dead matter and the continuity of nature. In this essay film, we watch them grow under the microscope while art conservators attempt to preserve humanity’s collective memory. The metaphor speaks for itself.
Aistė Žegulytė
Lithuania / France / Latvia

2025, 85'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Conference of the Birds

A football team coach dies—but he is no ordinary man, leaving behind a trail of grief and disorientation. What follows is far from contractual disputes over his replacement; here, football (or its behind-the-scenes world) serves merely as the backdrop for devotion and the question of what comes next to emerge. A series of surreal encounters and situations unfolds.
Amin Motallebzadeh
Germany

2025, 79'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

I Built a Rocket Imagining Your Arrival

Rosa lies inside an MRI machine. She is asked to think of a happy memory, something she doesn’t have. It is time to create one, by returning to her childhood, when her mother was arrested and accused of murder. And there they are, in a realistic reverie, travelling in an old hot dog van along the dirt roads of northern Brazil. Janaína Marques’ feature debut is a guided tour through a mind in turmoil, its landscapes and its wounds.
Janaína Marques
Brazil

2025, 92'
IndieLisboa 2026
National Competition

FILM

Kiss And Be Friends

In modern-day Lisbon, two art students drift through a weekend of escapism and late-capitalist burnout. Sofia and Amandine’s toxic friendship is put to the test when Amandine crosses paths with Guilherme, a pretentious artist, at an independent exhibition. Kiss and Be Friends is an acerbic comedy exploring intimacy, identity, and a generation driven by irony, anxiety, and Instagram.
Ana Baldini, Roly Witherow
Portugal

2026, 86'
IndieLisboa 2026
National Competition

FILM

According to Love

Saura, Filipe, João, Beatriz, Rita, and Marchana have a language of their own, shaped by the growing pains of childhood and the uncertainties of adult life. During the summer, Saura and Filipe, once deeply connected, begin to drift apart. As they try to understand what still remains between them, their language also begins to change, and with it the group of friends they share.
Rodrigo Braz Teixeira
Portugal / France

2026, 71'
IndieLisboa 2026
National Competition

FILM

Tropical Fractals

On an interstellar journey, a group of scientists studies the last living vestiges of Earth. The artificial intelligence, Museo, becomes a portal to the crew’s diaries and a fragmented archive of humanity. On Earth, the one believed to be the last of the humans traverses a ruined planet that is slowly recovering, little by little, from the apocalypse it endured.
Leonardo Pirondi
Portugal / Brazil

2026, 72'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

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'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

The Apple Doesn’t Fall…

Sentences are projected, but no reply ever comes. Movements are cold and unhurried — so that nothing can catch anyone off guard. Everything is calculated. Everything is plastic. Everything is exactly as it must be. Father, mother and daughter comply with what is written in their script: a façade-family performing a choreography they call home.
Dean Wei
China

2026, 19'
IndieLisboa 2026
Silvestre

FILM

Deep Cobalt

It has always been this way — and it still is: so that some may enjoy their possessions with little effort, others must exhaust themselves producing them. In the Mutoshi mine, in Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo — in the depths of the world — a community of workers known as the Rememberers extracts cobalt, a mineral essential to the manufacture of technological devices, under the most inhumane conditions. And yet, they endure.
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Democratic Republic of the Congo / United States

2026, 31'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Hotel Oblique

The obsession with wellness has reached every species. In a luxurious retreat that markets relaxation to restless birds, a budgie attempts to rediscover himself. For reasons he cannot quite explain, all he truly wants is to return to the safety of his cage.
Merlin Flügel
Germany

2026, 7'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Detective Smiley and the lost friends

The disappearance of an activist becomes the latest case for the young and enigmatic detective Smiley. Sleeves rolled up, she crosses a less obvious France, tracing the missing man’s footsteps in a lo-fi odyssey about the B-side of a generation — and of a nation. 
Antoine Du Jeu
France

2025, 30'
IndieLisboa 2026
Silvestre

FILM

Taxi Moto

A love story between two men — that was always the premise. But barred from filming it in his home country, the director was forced to reinvent it elsewhere, in another geography, with a different protagonist. The celebrated fusion of reality and fiction. Cinema as an act of discovery — and love.
Gaël Kamilindi
France / Switzerland

2026, 20'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Kontrewers

In a Polish folktale, a young possessed woman has lived for centuries inside the mysterious Kontrewers Stone. Zuza Banasińska — who presented work at IndieLisboa in 2024 — draws on this ghostly figure to set fiction and reality simmering in the same pot. Her 102-year-old grandmother, confined to her bedroom and gently waving toward death, encounters — and becomes enchanted by — the relic (or by the haunting presence that inhabits it), in a lucid affirmation that communication is far more than words.
Zuza Banasińska
Netherlands / Poland / France

2026, 21'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

The Shining Tapestry

The age of video surveillance has not only taken over our avenues; it has trespassed into the natural world. Today, we live online, in a reality where we can choose to follow a family of owls 24 hours a day. Will this bring us closer to truly knowing these wild animals? Or does it push us even further from understanding what inhabits their gaze and consciousness? Is this an excess of control — or simply monitoring?
Kai Harlow
Belgium / Hungary / Portugal

2025, 28'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Certas Formas

Loss often takes the slow silhouette of apathy. As if the gaze drifts away, as if walking were suffering and speaking a mountain to climb, Miguel and Laura drag themselves through pain in search of an embrace. Youth is an unspoken sentence.
Luiz Afonso Morêda
Brazil

2026, 16'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

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'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Buckskin

There are lives whose stories demand to be known. Carroll B. Williams Jr. was a pioneering forestry engineer, academic researcher, and entomologist — the first African American to be hired by the U.S. Forest Service — whose legacy within the American forest landscape is immeasurable. Mars Verrone, their grandson and the film’s director, dedicates this portrait to him.
Mars Verrone
United States

2025, 17'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Cycle of violence: Puppy Please!

Bunny and the viewer are locked in a relationship; yet the bed of roses, the sensual game, quickly drops its mask, unleashing violence that erupts and repeats itself relentlessly. How is an aggressor made?
Felicia Bergström
Germany

2024, 6'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

How to Catch a Butterfly

Sexual fetishes of white men toward Asian women have persisted for centuries — burdened with the macabre and racist promiscuity they inherently carry. In 2021, however, when Robert Aaron Long murdered eight women in Atlanta in an attempt to suppress his own desire, a new circle of hell was reached. Through a series of letters, Dutch–Japanese filmmaker Kiriko Mechanichus addresses the killer directly. Why?
Kiriko Mechanicus
Netherlands

2026, 26'
IndieLisboa 2026
International Competition

FILM

Fiction Contract

Yes, obstetric healthcare is also marked by severe racial inequalities. In Fiction Contract, Carolyn Lazard records a simulated childbirth performed by Jada, a Black mannequin — a staging that is at once perfectly surreal and profoundly necessary
Carolyn Lazard
United States

2025, 10'

  • TEXT

  • CONTENT TYPE

NEWSLETTER

NEWSLETTER