National Competition — IndieLisboa

01 MAY — 11 MAY 2024

01 MAY — 11 MAY 2024

Filters

Filters

It brings together Portuguese feature and short films, most of which have their first world or national presentation at IndieLisboa.

National Competition

It brings together Portuguese feature and short films, most of which have their first world or national presentation at IndieLisboa.

A Mother Goes to the Beach

Teresa, a single mother spends a day at the beach with her six-year-old son, Benji and her sister Marga, who is back in Portugal for a summer vacation. The day becomes very stressful with her sister’s constant speech about her son’s achievements and her criticisms towards Benji.

2023, 16'

Anything but the Movies

In the film festival, everyone talks about anything but the movies.

Lourenço Crespo, Afonso Mota

2024, 9'

Banzo

1907. Afonso starts life anew on a tropical island off the African coast, as a plantation physician. He is tasked with treating servants “infected” by Banzo, a profound homesickness fatal to many slaves who succumb to starvation or take their own lives. To prevent spreading, the group is sent to a secluded hill encircled by forest. Afonso tries to heal them, but understanding their spirits is a challenge stronger than any medical intervention.

Margarida Cardoso

2024, 127'

Felicidade numa Panela

While cooking, Yaxuan notices that her pot makes a peculiar sound. That sound will generate a rambling around food rituals, which appear as a bridge between past and present.

2024, 19'

Gold Songs

Domingos and Neusia are a young couple from a small city in Mozambique. She goes to school, he has an underpaid job at a car wash. Yearning for a better life, he decides to make a change. This will lead Domingos on a journey through Mozambique, heading to the gold mines in the north of the country. Neusia stays home. Shortly after, she has news. For technical reasons, it will not be possible to show the film with descriptive subtitles (LSE).

Portugal / France

2024, 104'

Greice

Greice, a 21-year-old Brazilian girl, studies at Fine Arts University in Lisbon. In the early days of summer, she gets involved with a mysterious guy, Afonso. The couple is accused of a strange accident that occurs at the students’ welcoming night party. Greice needs to return to Fortaleza. Hidden in a hotel, while preventing her mother from discovering the problems in which she was involved, Greice tries to find a place of comfort in the world.

Leonardo Mouramateus

Portugal / Brazil

2024, 110'

Hands in the Fire

The young film student Maria do Mar is working on a documentary about the old manor houses along the Douro River. It is her thesis on Reality in Cinema. The last house she visits it’s a more isolated house, hidden between the vineyards. She’s enchanted by everything that seems genuine and, in her opinion, true. Until one day. Her touching candour leads her blindly to the depths of horror.

2024, 109'

Histories of Smugglers

Tourém is a frontier village on the border between Portugal and Spain. It has a reputation as a “smugglers’ nest”, with many villagers involved in the business, in the past. They smuggled goods due to shortages at the time. They risked their lives for a living.

2024, 20'

I Have Never Been this Close

In a rural periphery amid transformation, agricultural machines devastate the fields and the places are haunted by an eternal gloom. Out of the flames, the bells are reborn, invoking the presence of the community.

Francisca Dores

2024, 17'

Kudibanguela

A young political prisoner, whose whereabouts are unknown to his family, tries to convince an older prisoner to pass on a note to the outside.

Bernardo Magalhães

2024, 21'

Man of Aral

As a staged tale of a sea with no water, Man of Aral presents the erosion of the Aral Sea landscape and of the film material itself as competing human and geological timelines through distant views of a rapidly yet almost invisibly changing territory, a key event of unprecedented scale.

Helena Gouveia Monteiro

Ireland / France / Portugal

2023, 7'

Manga d’Terra

Rosa, 20, left Cape Verde to settle in Reboleira, a poor district of Lisbon. She works in a bar to send money home to her children. Caught between the harassment of kingpins and daily police violence, Rosa tries to find solace among the women of the community. But her real escape is music…

Switzerland / Portugal

2023, 96'

Never More is Too Much Time

A film director and producer meet a professional fortune teller to get information about the narrative of their next short film. Later they find themselves in a delicate situation, where the predictions about the film’s casting were quite right.

2024, 24'

Nocturne for a forest

In the 15th century, in Portugal, a group of monks built a wall around a forest and prevented the entry of women. But the hands of the living cannot control everything: in the invisible world, where night reigns and only souls light up the forest, women have built their kingdom of invisibility, without walls.

Catarina Vasconcelos

2023, 16'

On Plains of Larger River & Woodlands

Sandy Bay, Tasmania. Imogen and Audrey navigate their lives in isolation. On Plains of Larger River & Woodlands explores the natural and arcade landscape they occupy as foreboding clouds roll in on a brink of a post-apocalyptic existence.

Miguel de Jesus

Portugal / Australia

2024, 13'

Quando a Terra Foge

Amid the fog and the labyrinth of time, while machines probe the geological depths of the mountain, a shepherd searches for an errant cow. Childhood finds its way back, the mountain transforms itself, the cycle continues.

Portugal / Spain

2024, 29'

Rehearsal & Repetition

A group of friends performs an experiment about space and duration, body and dance. One of them jumps from a structure repeatedly, others just watch, while someone else inhabits the house under construction.

2024, 10'

Romagem

Tomé’s birth was nothing short of a miracle. On the day of his 18th birthday, he left for Senhora da Graça to fulfill the promise left by his old parents.

2024, 33'