Director’s Cut — IndieLisboa

01 MAY — 11 MAY 2025

01 MAY — 11 MAY 2025

Filters

Filters

Director’s Cut, the section for the most curious film lovers, is now dedicated exclusively to heritage cinema, presenting a selection of films in newly restored digital prints. The aim is to revisit the history of cinema, recovering forgotten films, highlighting obscure gems and proposing new titles for the canon of ‘great cinema’. This year there’s a bit of everything: between curiosities and masterpieces, between queer musicals and sci-fi pornos, between the ethnographic and the symphonic, between the political and the poetic.

Director’s Cut

Director’s Cut, the section for the most curious film lovers, is now dedicated exclusively to heritage cinema, presenting a selection of films in newly restored digital prints. The aim is to revisit the history of cinema, recovering forgotten films, highlighting obscure gems and proposing new titles for the canon of ‘great cinema’. This year there’s a bit of everything: between curiosities and masterpieces, between queer musicals and sci-fi pornos, between the ethnographic and the symphonic, between the political and the poetic.

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, 74'

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'

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'

Iracema, uma transa amazônica

A digitally restored version of a fundamental title in the history of Brazilian cinema that mixes fiction and non-fiction in a road movie — starring a young girl from Iracema and an unruly truck driver — that travels through the destruction caused by a specific type of post-colonial capitalism: the construction of the Transamazon Highway. The film explores an area of the Amazon that was under the control of the armed forces at the time of the military dictatorship in Brazil.

Jorge Bodanzky, Orlando Senna

Brazil / West Germany

1975, 96'

The Sealed Soil

Simultaneously the first film by Marva Nabili, in a stunning directorial debut, and the oldest surviving (in its entirety) Iranian film directed by a woman. In this 4K restoration, a young woman in pre-revolutionary Iran finds herself at a crossroads between tradition and the desire for freedom, where her refusal of marriage offers is equated by her family with possession by malevolent spirits.

1977, 89'