Here in Lisbon
Welcome to Lisbon: there are mermaids by the Tagus and birds flying over the old city; there are mad scientists and singing fish; lost tourist guides and lost tourists; fado and sad guitars. What a weird city you may think - but no. Lisbon is about being different, sarcastic, welcoming to foreigners even in an economic crisis. Different directors became fascinated by our strangeness. We became fascinated by these directors. The city is never the same in these four episodes, here in Lisbon.
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Denis Côté
Six men. The forest. The menace is there somewhere. Armed, ready, looking for action, they wander, day and night, striving for a confrontation.
An unseen presence traverses a snowy landscape and enters a series of winter homes, in which slumbering occupants go eerily undisturbed.
A popular sensation in medieval Europe, bestiaries were catalogs of beasts featuring exotic animal illustrations, zoological wisdom, and ancient legends. The documentary unfolds like a filmic picture book where both humans and animals are on display. As we observe them, they also observe us and one another, invoking the Hindu idea of “darshan”: a mutual beholding that initiates a shift in consciousness.
In "Spaces #2", 7 internationally acclaimed directors shot, after commissioning by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, a short film at home, making their own timely comment on the new reality that we live in. The project is inspired by the book "Species of Spaces" by the French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist, Georges Perec and the days of quarantine. The idea is to create a film at home, using the environment, the people or the animals in that space. The only outdoor areas that may be used are outdoor living spaces, such as the terrace, the garden, the balcony and the stairwell. "cnfnmnt e/scp(i)sm" is Denis Côté's submission.
A couple's impasse is refracted through the world’s great tragedies, and the news of "what is happening in Kosovo”. A tender, indifferent, cynical and bittersweet slice of melodrama.
An old fashioned waltz. Flirting with horror cinema, here is the portrait of an aging New Brunswick population, unfolding like a found footage object equally elegiac as it is nightmarish.
A man and his toys make for an uneasy ballad.
Set in a rural Québec village in the dead of winter, Jean-François, a single father, works at a deserted bowling alley at night and in a rundown motel during the day. His daughter, Julyvonne never leaves their home. Jean-François isolates her in fear that contact with the outside world will scar her the way it has him.
After a lengthy virtual relationship over the Internet, Milena and Philip take the plunge and agree to finally meet. Having lived in Montreal for over a decade, Milena, an immigrant of Bulgarian descent, accepts to greet her correspondent Philip, a flirtatious photographer from Sofia. Out in an isolated cottage in Quebec's countryside, the couple abandon themselves to one another. Between periods of cultural clashes and fleshly pleasures, the two assess each other and the possibilities for true love. But strange, uncanny events soon disrupt Milena and Philip's quiet intimacy as secrecy and silence slowly set in -nihilproductions
Without dialogues, Maϊté shows us an adolescent who goes to a big city to a black metal concert.
Also Directed by Marie Losier
A woman with an oddly hairy belly gives birth to a pair of hands in Marie Losier’s giddily inventive "portrait" of filmmaker Guy Maddin, done as a collaboration between the two iconoclasts. A longtime fan of Maddin, Losier (best known for other inventive portraits of underground film icons like Tony Conrad and George Kuchar) hoped to document him as well; "I hate my voice and face," Maddin replied, and sent her Super-8 footage of his hands instead. Losier interwove the footage into her own distinct tale, shot like a surrealist 1920s silent film. A must for fans of Losier, Maddin and ingenious cinema in general, MANUELLE LABOR was completed for the Berlin Film Festival (where Maddin was the guest of honor). - Jason Sanders A collaboration film by Marie Losier and Guy Maddin. Two sisters, five brothers, a doctor and two nurses and the miraculous birth of a pair of hands, but whose hands?
In 1971, Ingmar Bergman made his only American film, THE TOUCH, starring ensemble regulars Max Von Syndow and Bibi Anderson, along with early 70's everyman Elliott Gould. In 2001, Marie Losier decided to recast herself in Gould’s role, breathing new life into Bergman’s most awkward, ill-conceived and dubious filmic endeavor.
In this dream-portrait, Mike Kuchar floats through his memories as the sea, space and sky drift past. Wrapped in odd costumes, he frolics with the imaginary creatures surrounding him, and recalls the creatures of his own imagination.
Cet Air là is a famous french song from 1963, sung live by NY singer April March in acapella with Julien Gasc. The couple is singing while flying over a superimposed 16mm projection of a stop motion animation of a series of clouds, birds, bubbles, smoke machines and glitter, the song has the texture of a dream.
A giant pot is ascending from the sky. Twenty winsome damsels are landing on planet earth, coming out of the pot filled with two-hundred and eighty pounds of spaghetti. A battle for sauce and survival ensues.
Louis II de Barrière has been petrified in the ice since the dawn of time. We find him in a forest, luckily he is alive ! Three witch sisters try to defrost it and unravel its musical mystery. We are propelled with them in a colorful and surreal fairy tale.
Small performance with Jackie Raynal and Marie Losier. Simply set up by Marie in an empty New York gallery, which she packed with props and shooting devices, with the idea to invite friends of her to come and shoot short films together. Good times with Jackie, trying to fold a green screen which in the end was never fold but instead allowed us to create a whole new choregraphy.
While in NYC, home sweet home, Felix Kubin came to visit as we were still working on the feature film FElix in Wonderland, and we were asked to do a performance together at PS1. So Felix wrote a new song and I proposed to do a 2h live film shoot and the audience would watch us make a film. So I gathered my family of friends from NY and we did a sort of 16mm filmed happening that I directed live. The result is DOWNLOAD YOURSELF!
This intimate portrait will reveal uncommon stories of groundbreaking visual artist and pioneer of minimalist electronic rock, Alan Vega, vocalist and composer for 1970s and 80s punk/post punk duo Suicide. Alan plays with the camera and enjoys the friendship of filmmaker Losier, while also loving, fighting and living with his family (Liz Lamere, his wife and collaborator, and their son Dante, young replica of Alan). Traces of joy, eccentricity, illumination but also deep fatigue and slow Suicide. The rock-n-roll Alan is still very alive, funny and rebellious.
Also Directed by Dominga Sotomayor
Luciano is a special boy. He is 15 years old and he is obsessed with skies. This documentary its an invitation to live his fantasy of being a pilot for a day, and fly a Cessna.
Martin goes on vacation to the beach with his girlfriend. Everything seems normal, until his mother arrives. Lightning strikes and there is a car to disappear.
A group of people gather for a family reunion in a house on an isolated island. They are waiting for the last person to join them, but as the evening arrives and he doesn’t arrive, a strange anxiety overwhelms them. The group dismantles and the family members wander away from the house separately, confronting the sea and an unspoken fear that slowly consumes them.
A woman and her grown daughter attempt to break quarantine in order to see her other daughter's newborn child.
Jose and Manuel are climbing the Montserrat mountain. They have not seen each other in some years, and they are in Spain for a funeral. It is a narrow, winding, uneven path up the mountain that makes communication difficult, until they reach an appropriate place to rest.
Jaime, who’s been away from the city by his own free will, invites his family to watch an eclipse at his house on the mountains. The tensions in the group are apparent, but they slowly vanish, reaching the most transparent moment among the eclipse’s darkness.
A child plays Wii tennis while his parents divvy up and and pack the furniture. One camera angle, one perspective, one situation, with a strong emotional charge. The child is immersed in the virtual world of the game while the real world stays off-screen.
An actress travels to Lisbon representing a film where she has a secondary role, regarding nobody else was available to go. In the Q&A in the Cinematheque she doesn't know how to answer the audience questions.
During a very dry summer in an isolated community far from the city. Sofia, Clara and Lucas face their first loves and fears, while preparing the New Year's party, without knowing that nature threatens them.
In the form of a filmed epistolary conversation, two young, experienced filmmakers discuss film, present and past family, heritage and maternity. The personal and profound reflections—which are embodied in the graceful images taken day-to-day—are suddenly echoed by the political emergency of a country.
Also Directed by Gabriel Abrantes
In a dystopian future where survival of all life on the planet depends on the ragged remnants of what used to be the Amazon rainforest, eco-activist couple Rob and Ryan acknowledge the fact that their mission to save humanity from extinction is doomed. Leaving the rainforest behind, they and adopt little Sasha, born of a young woman who rented her womb for money only to die giving birth. Forced to look straight into the cynicism and selfishness of their choices, while Apocalypse rages around them, Rob and Ryan must finally face their own contradictions without hypocrisy.
In this short comedy, Luis Vaz de Camoes, the greatest Portuguese renaissance poet, struggles creatively while engaging in a hedonistic, coprophagic, and drug addled lifestyle. The film follows the poet, and his lover Dinamene, as he writes his masterpiece, the epic poem "Os Lusiadas." He travels from the cacophony of the Indic jungles, surrounded by allegorical elephants and rhyming macaques, to the frontier of Heaven and Hell, where he is confronted by his fantasy: fame and immortality.
Set in Haiti, more precisely in the places affected by the 2010 tsunami, Ornithes shows us the attempt of theatre director Gabriel Abrantes to stage an as faithful as possible adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes. However, his pedantic attitude dulls the locals, who start to rebel against his impositions. Spaced out by imaginative stories about wives transformed into goats and offered as gifts to Gods, Abrantes's revision is a game of mirrors, in which a fantastic tale alternates with another, representing a vibrant and colorful context where folklore, myth and modern myths such as Robert Patterson of Twilight overlap each other.
Using a mix of Hollywood aesthetics with documentary strategies, the film follows a young indigenous girl from the Xingu National Park to São Paulo, where she falls in love with a robot that also happens to be a stand-up comedian. This strange story mixes the anthropology of humor, indigenous communities, and artificial intelligence.
Three teenage girls are heading home in their Mini Cooper S. They discuss their boyfriends, their boyfriend's mothers, their boyfriend's mother's cars, and Judaism.
Tired of being a banal architectural ornamental, a sculpture runs from the Louvre to confront real life on the streets of Paris.
Mallard Gibson and Singuz Gumpfree have disowned the society of men: they have instead long conversations with a hare named Jackrabbit, with whom they share a shack on the banks of the East River. Amongst mystic visions, dark humour and anarchic associations of heterogeneous elements, Abrantes stages a post-modern, urban, completely delirious Alice in Wonderland, with a twist in the tail in store for the unsuspecting rabbit.
Story about Incest and the Iraq war.
This radical diptych recasts Manet's canonical painting as a scandalous psychodrama: in the first part, a prostitute (Katie Widloski) and her brother (Gabriel Abrantes) struggle with their incestuous urges; in the second, a prostitute (Abrantes) copes with her loneliness on a slow night for business.
A headlong dive into the deepest, silliest recesses of Abrantes’s unconscious.