Doclisboa 2022

The 2022 programme comprises 281 films, 47 of which are world premieres, and 44 Portuguese films. The 20th edition, running 6-16 October, is dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. “A free and thought-provoking mind, committed and attentive filmmaker. We owe him the programme we present today and we celebrate his life in each screening,” say organisers.

A Date in Minsk by Nikita Lavretski wins the City of Lisbon Award for Best International Competition Film, while Alejandro Vasquez’s A Landscape Area Too Quiet For Me (pictured) wins the YouTube International Competition Jury Award. Best Portuguese Competition nods went to two films, The Visit and the Secret Garden by Irene M. Borrego and Vexations by Leonardo Mouramateus. All awards…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.