Doclisboa '23

The new documentary chronicles the protests, sit-ins and strikes of workers in southern Spain as they face up to the prospect that they might be laid off. When she began filming, director Rodríguez made it clear to the strikers that she wasn’t a journalist working on a piece of reportage. She was a documentary maker making a film about the “convulsive changes” of the late industrial era, she tells BDE.

The new feature documentary Fire In The Mud unfolds in Unal, a rice producing village in Guinea-Bissau where the elders still have strong memories of the colonial war, lasting from 1963 to1974, in which the country fought for its independence from Portugal. But for the village’s youth, matters are somewhat different. “To them, the war was like a narrative from the past, like a fairy tale, a violent one, but really lost in the past,” Barroca tells BDE.

The winners of Doclisboa’s Arché and Nebulae pitch awards were announced October 22. For its ninth edition, Arché gathered film projects from 10 countries around the globe, including Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. The eight Nebulae Award competitors were all produced or co-produced in Finland, the guest country for this edition.

Prolific Canadian filmmaker Olivier Godin’s documentary shows visual artist and choreographer Adam Kinner and his dancers at work recreating the 1957 ballet work Suite Canadienne. “I had never done a documentary before. I thought, OK, let’s try things,” Godin tells BDE of his freewheeling approach to the task. It helped that Kinner gave the director ‘carte blanche’ to approach the film in any way he saw fit.

UK doccer Marc Isaacs talks to Business Doc Europe about his multi-layered new film set in the sleepy British town of Thaxted. It’s a film that involves ghosts and Morris dancing and a Chinese filmmaker visiting the town to find to the subject of her next film. “I was already thinking about Englishness, mythology and the way that the country over the last few years has desperately been trying to solidify some sense of itself,” Isaacs reflects.

Fest director Miguel Ribeiro talks to Business Doc Europe about the upcoming edition of Doclisboa which presents 250 films from 42 countries, including 35 world premieres and 39 Portuguese films. “We see documentary as a way to employ the tools of cinema to take us on a quest of discovery. And for this, you need to have freedom for production, and freedom to think, to question and to reflect.” The festival opens October 19 with Wang Bing's Man in Black and closes with Leonor Teles’ Baan.

The upcoming Doclisboa will screen 250 films from 42 countries, including 35 world premieres and 39 Portuguese films. This year's International Competition includes selections from 16 countries and features 6 world premieres. Of the 39 Portuguese films in this year's edition, nine are in Portuguese Competition, 7 of which are world premieres. “The films reveal the pulse of the world and those who inhabit it,” the festival writes of this year’s programme.

The project development lab will take place between October 19 and 25 during Nebulae, the industry programme of Doclisboa (Lisbon, 19-29 October). This year, 354 projects from 20 Ibero-American countries and Italy applied and 15 were selected (12 film projects and three research and criticism projects). Ten countries are represented and the projects are all at different stages of production.

Doclisboa has announced the first confirmed titles for its next edition, running 19-29 October. Five films in the Heart Beat section and five in the From the Earth to the Moon section “draw up a unique, rhythmic, varied landscape; from dance to literature, to music and the pleasures of the palate – and from the stage to the deep green jungle,” write festival organisers.