Doclisboa 2022

Nebulae, the 6-day industry programme of Doclisboa, will lift off Tuesday October 11. “Nebulae shapes itself as a welcoming and informal space that encourages new collaborations and offers training, networking, access to market circuits for new projects, tools and knowledge about innovative tendencies and alternative production models in the domain of non-fiction cinema,” says programme chief Glenda Balucani.

Spanish director Alejandro Vázquez San Miguel profiles his beloved grandparents, who hail from a background steeped in cinema. “It is incredible the life they have had, it fills me with pride and admiration. For me they are undoubtedly a mirror in which to look at myself every day, but not only for their past, but for how they carry that past in the present,” he tells BDE.

The sense of laid-back cool that infuses the music of the band Cymande is very much reflected in this engagingly straight-forward documentary that traces the history of the band and details the influence their work had on musicians who came after them, especially in the world of hip-hop where tracks often 20 years old were sampled by major players.

Angolan-Portuguese Mónica de Miranda’s The Island is a project with a double life - as an installation piece as well as a film - and originally commissioned as part of an exhibition exploring “Afrodiasporic lives and colonial pasts” at the Autograph Gallery in London. “I have two versions of the film, one for the installation and a visual arts context and one for cinema viewing,” the artist/filmmaker tells BDE.

A playfully provocative delve into work of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his dance/art troupe La Pocha Nostra, Amber Bemak’s engagingly breezy and busy documentary manages to offer plenty of insight into culture and politics while also playfully blurring the line between filmmaker and subject.

There can be few more poignant or nostalgic films screening at this year’s DocLisboa than Léo Liotard’s It’s Party Time. Shot on a Camcorder when he was a student, Liotard and his friends were young and sometimes pretentious. They drank too much. They talked about sex and relationships. They played music. They even danced around naked. “Adolescence is a very narcissistic time of life,” he tells BDE.

Berlin-based filmmaker Claudia Müller discusses her new documentary about the Austrian Nobel Prize-winning novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek who is admired and reviled in equal measure. I thought, ‘Oh my god, how can I do this when there are so many opinions about her?’ I thought it was best if she speaks for herself,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

In his new film screening in DocLisboa’s Portuguese competition, João Rosas looks at Lisbon from an unlikely new perspective - that of construction workers destroying old buildings to make way for luxury apartments. “When I was invited to do this film on the construction site, I saw it as a microcosm of what was happening to the city,” the director tells BDE.

Doclisboa director Miguel Ribeiro outlines the importance of Lisbon’s annual documentary celebration, both to international industry and Portuguese public alike. “It is a place of encounters and connections through cinema, with film at its center,” he explains to Business Doc Europe. The 20th edition of Doclisboa kicks off 6 October, running for the next 11 days.

The project development lab Arché will take place between October 12-20, in part during Nebulae, the industry programme of Doclisboa. This year, 12 projects were selected from 122 submissions from 19 Ibero American countries, plus Italy. The dozen projects in selection are at different stages of production, and hail from 10 countries.