INDIE LISBOA IN FULL SAIL
Last year’s award-winning success of Azazel Jacob‘s Momma’s Man at the IndieLisboa Film Festival solidified Lisbon’s status as a rewarding new festival avenue for emerging American independent film. This year they seem to be building upon that relationship, with a program that reads like a who’s who of current U.S. indies, including Lance Hammer‘s Ballast, Barry Jenkin‘s Medicine For Melancholy, Sean Baker‘s Prince of Broadway, Josh Safdie‘s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, and Kelly Reichardt‘s Wendy and Lucy. It’s surprising to find so many strong American indies in a European festival; it’d even be surprising to find so many in an American one (as a quick comparison, the San Francisco Film Festival showed only two of the five works above, while two of the others haven’t even been shown at all in San Francisco). Held in a beautiful city, with a small yet fascinating line-up, a friendly, convivial atmosphere and a manageable schedule (enough time to explore Lisbon in the morning and afternoon, then see a few films, and still make it out to the official festival nightclub afterwards), IndieLisboa is certainly a festival “on the rise;” visiting it now, in only its sixth year, is like what visiting now-established festivals like Rotterdam or Vancouver must have been like when they first started. It’s not as essential or over-reaching as Rotterdam, Berlin, Vienna or Venice, of course, but it’s far more charming, and far less exhausting.
Whether it moves further, of course, depends not on the artistic integrity of imports like the American, Romanian or French films that dot its schedule, but on its own national cinema. Possibly Portuguese cinema’s most famous name, Manoel de Oliveira (now over 100 years old) debuted his newest film, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, at the festival, but it’s some of the lesser-known directors that made an even more intriguing impression. Ivo M. Ferreira unlocked the emotional scars of the 1974 Portuguese Revolution in his family drama/road trip work April Showers, which followed a young man’s search through the dry Alentejo and coastal Algarve regions for the mystery behind his father’s disappearance. Joao Rosas‘ experimental documentary Birth of a City combined visual snapshots of London with the story of an artist literally painting a similar portrait of city; its uniting of cinema, painting, and poetic voice-overs refreshingly avoided heavy-handedness for a pleasing, memorable lightness. In Ruinas (Ruins), by Manuel Mozos, there’s a different kind of city landscape: it’s a documentary on ruined buildings, with Mozos training his camera on abandoned homes, deserted hospitals, and crumbling estates like von Sternberg trained his camera on Dietrich. Epic long takes allow viewers to appreciate the sheer beauty of decay (it’s a powerful film to see in Lisbon, home of countless similar old ruins), while narrators accompany the images with texts from various centuries, all recounting obituaries, sicknesses, loves lost, even hotel accommodation requests (!) Produced by the same folks behind Miguel Gomes‘ Our Beloved Month of August, Ruins has a poetry about it that’s similar to the landscape cinema of James Benning, only fleshed out with a saudade-fueled sorrow that seems to ooze from the Portuguese setting.
Beyond the American indies (most of which have been written about in these pages recently, but some of which I’ll get back to in a later post) and the Portuguese works, IndieLisboa offers a strong International Narrative Competition, a National Cinema Spotlight and Competition for Portuguese films, and a surprisingly vibrant short-film competition. Along with tributes/retrospectives to Jacques Nolot and Werner Herzog, sections on Emerging Cinema, Director’s Cut (new re-releases or films on filmmaking), IndieMusic (docs on, that’s right, music), and some hilariously lively “IndieJunior” screenings for families (including hands-on filmmaking sessions and constant hi-fives between luckless interns in panda bear costumes and the small children who love them), it’s got enough to keep most attendees busy, but certainly not busy enough to miss the festival’s other attraction: Lisbon itself, one of the most wondrous and unjustly overlooked cities in Europe (and, important to those of us on a budget, one of the most affordable).
Late yesterday afternoon found festival guests on a sailboat cruise down the Rio (River) Tejo, with the red roofs, multi-colored tile walls, and winding cobblestoned streets of the city on dazzling display. Looking from the water to the shore, one could only wonder why Lisbon wasn’t a spotlight destination; possibly by IndieLisboa’s end, one might wonder the same about the festival.
