Doclisboa 2022

Fernando Sulichin has been working with Oliver Stone for going on 20 years. He has enabled Stone to make documentaries about some of the most colourful and contentious figures in contemporary world politics. One of their latest collaborations, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, screened in Doclisboa a few days ago, where BDE caught up with the Argentinean-born maverick.

A survivor of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the story of Aurora Mardiganin is the harrowing true story of a teenager who, after seeing her family murdered, embarked on a remarkable journey that involved incarceration within a Turkish harem and escape to the US. Her story was eventually re-told in a silent Hollywood film. That she re-lived that story as star of the film makes it all the more chilling. Armenian Academy Award Int'l Feature submission.

The Portuguese doc fest celebrates the past two decades with a special edition and opening/closing sessions held simultaneously in the cities of Lisbon and Porto. The festival closes October 15 with a screening of Love Lights by Acácio de Almeida and Marie Carré, described as “a declaration of love to photography and cinema.”

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.

The Nebulae project follows the journey of indigenous filmmaker Sueli Maxakali and her sister Maisa to Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil), in search of their father, the shaman Luis Kaiowá, from whom they were separated as children during the Brazilian military dictatorship. Co-director Roberto Romero discusses the project with Business Doc Europe.

At the Lisbon awards ceremony held October 13, Clara Jost’s ‘Lettre à Eric Pauwels - ou a Florista e o Cônsul’ picked up the DAFilms awards, valued at €5000 in kind. The DAE Talent Encouragement Award was handed to Beyond Landscape by Etienne de France while te Pitch the Doc Award, given to a project from the guest country France, went to Under the Volcano by Sara Rastegar and Simone Pozzi.

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.

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.

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…

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.