Portugal is this year’s guest country at the European Coproductions forum. Seville Festival (SEFF) has decided to organize the section again, after the success of last year’s edition; indeed, Portugal and its films have always been welcomed at the festival. We are reviewing SEFF and the neighbouring country’s relationship, remembering ten award-winning films and filmmakers that left Seville with the applause of the crowd.
Seville Festival has certainly opened doors for Portuguese films and upsurging authors with lots to say. Throughout its 17 editions, the festival has shown the unusual, creative, and innovative gaze of these filmmakers. With the turn of the century, they renewed the film scene in a nearby country which is yet a great unknown for many Spanish cinephiles. This year’s festival proposes two films by two directors from different generations and with a different education who, nevertheless, have some spiritual and formal similarities.
The festival programmes a special session of O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis, João Botelho’s latest work. This film connects Botelho, an experienced filmmaker, with two icons of the Portuguese culture —José Saramago and Fernando Pessoa. The film, an adaptation of the homonymous novel by the author of Blindness. It follows the end of life of Ricardo Reis —which is one of the heteronyms of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa— on his way back to Lisbon in 1936 after 16 years of exile in Brazil. There he encounters a country worried about Hitler’s nazism rise to power, Mussolini’s fascism, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and Salazar’s dictatorship. As usual, Botelho films it magnificently, with an overwhelming visual richness.
Revoluciones Permanentes, for their part, shows Carlos Conceiçao’s second feature film, after his debut with Serpentário (2019), which was awarded in Montreal and DocLisboa. The director, who has vast experience in making short films, presents Um fio de Baba Escarlate, a film in which he plays and turns the classic Italian giallo upside down. The film follows the setbacks of a serial killer whose appearance in a video has gone viral.
These two films show the importance that Portuguese films will have in the second edition of European Coproductions. The coproduction forum of the SEFF has selected ten projects —five Spanish ones and five Portuguese ones— that aim for three awards in this edition —Seville Festival award, 5,000 € in cash for the winning project; Arte Sonora Estudios award, 5,000 € in post-production services; and RTP (Rádio e Televisão de Portugal) award, 10,000€ for broadcasting rights.
All of what has been mentioned gives us an excuse to delve into ten films and filmmakers that demonstrate the love story between Seville Festival and new Portuguese films —prosperous, free, lively and that, beyond Manoel de Oliveira’s work, is far less known among us than what it logically should judging by the proximity.
Technoboss (2019)
Who: João Nicolau, 45 years old, actor, film editor, and director. He made his debut with the feature film A Espada e a Rosa (2010), after filming short films selected by the best European film festivals. His second feature film, John From, was shown in the New Waves section, in Seville Festival 2015. His third one, Technoboss, won the Grand Jury Award in Seville in 2019.
What: an incredible musical comedy whose main character (the non-professional newcomer Miguel Lobo Antunes) is a sixty-year-old divorced man who is about to retire and lives alone with a cat. Technoboss takes a chance on absurd and dislocated humour, involving musical numbers with a naive and theatrical approach that touch and amuse the audience with a fresh look at the old age.
Danses macabres, squelettes et autres fantaisies (2019)
Who: Rita Azevedo Gomes, 68 years old. A very personal voice. Worked at the Cinemateca Portuguesa for almost 30 years. She made her debut in 1990 with O som da terra e tremer. Her career as a director includes films such as La venganza de una mujer (2012) or Correspondencias (2016).
What: Azevedo releases an essay film that goes deep into the artistic genre of the Danse Macabre or dance of death. In order to do this, she counts on the actor and film editor Pierre Léon and the writer and philosopher Jean-Louis Schefer. This work tries to avoid rigidity and involves the audience in the reflections —both ludic and deep— of three wise men. The film stood out in the New Waves section in 2019.
Sobre tudo sobre nada (2018)
Who: Dídio Pestana, 42 years old. He is a Portuguese director who lives in Berlin, where he has worked as a sound engineer, composer, and musician in different bands. Pestana’s directorial debut was filmed throughout eight years in many countries around the globe (not only in European countries such as Germany or Denmark but also on the other side of the pond, such as Bolivia, Argentina, or Chile) and was shown at Seville Festival 2018 in its section Revoluciones Permanentes.
What: filming is a lifestyle. Pestana films his trips from Berlin to Lisbon with a Super 8mm camera, capturing experiences, moods, things that come and go, and, above all, his relationship with his father and his family.
Extinçao (2018)
Who: Salomé Lamas, 33 years old. She explores the limits of non-fiction films, thus opening new ways. She is the author of many short films that have travelled the world being shown in festivals and art galleries. Her work includes performance, installation, and writing. Lamas made her debut with No Man’s Land (2012) in Berlinale and her films Eldorado XXI (2016) and Extinçao (2018) have been selected in the New Waves Non-Fiction section of the Seville’s Festival.
What: Extinçao is a minimalist film that uses black and white in an expressionist way. It is a dangerous and lethargically emotional road movie that reflects on the dismantling of borders, the sense of identity, the feeling of belonging, and the uprooting. It is based on the portrait of Kolja, a Moldavian young man who remains loyal to Transnistria, a country that is not recognized by the international community and that is still immersed in the communist ideology.
Mariphasa (2018)
Who: Sandro Aguilar, 46 years old. A key name to understand this new wave of Portuguese filmmakers that are invigorating their country’s film scene since the turn of the century. He owns the production company O som e a furia and fueled films by directors such as Manoel de Oliveira or Miguel Gomes. Furthermore, his name is in the credit titles of some of the films mentioned in this article. As a director, he has made more than fifteen short films and has filmed A Zona (2008) and Mariphasa (2017), which were shown in Seville Festival 2018 in the New Waves section.
What: Sandro Aguilar’s second feature film is an elusive, incomprehensible and inscrutable —yet stimulating and intriguing— train of shadows that captures an enigmatic and atmospheric trip to the darkness of a man who lost his daughter under tragical circumstances and who works every night as a guard in a construction.
The Nothing Factory (2017)
Who: Pedro Pinho, 43 years old. He filmed the successful The Nothing Factory as a member of the Terratreme collective (with a script co-written by Tiago Hespanha, Luisa Homem, Leonor Noivo, Jorge Silva Melo, and Pinho himself). He had directed two documentaries before (Bab sebta and A cidades e as trocas) and a feature film, Um fim do mundo (2013), which he presented in Berlinale. The astonishing The Nothing Factory took part in the Official Section of Seville 2017.
What: This free and radical film was awarded the Flamante Giraldillo de Oro in the 14th edition of the Seville Festival and recognized at Cannes Festival. It was filmed in 16 mm and it includes elements of the documentary itself and an extravagant musical number, turning this way into a social film. Radical, supportive, with a convincing message against wild capitalism. It portraits a group of workers who decide to withstand in their positions, defending their rights and against the dismantling of the lift factory where they work, taking a chance on self-management.
Ramiro (2017)
Who: Manuel Mozos, 61 years old. He is a benchmark for Portuguese cinema as a director and film editor. He also stands out for his work in the Cinematica Portuguesa, as well as for directing films such as Xavier (1992), Solitarium (1996,) or 4 Hearts (2008). Thanks to Ramiro, the filmmaker participated in Seville Festival 2017.
What: Ramiro is a feel-good comedy with some touch of absurd humour. The film is based on a poet and bookseller specialized in old books, which he uses as a way of satirizing literature’s world. This film seeps into Ramiro’s strange everyday life, in which other characters are involved. Some of them are a pregnant teenager, an elderly woman in a recovery period, and some friends who share secrets and drunkenness with him. Ramiro is a grumpy but close guy.
Colo (2017)
Who: Teresa Villaverde, 54 years old. She is one of the most outstanding filmmakers of the nineties’ Portuguese cinema wave, already awarded with her debut A idade maior (1991). Her filmography became relevant when the Venice International Film Festival awarded Maria de Madeiros with the Volpi Cup for her interpretation in Três Irmãos (1994). She continued receiving recognition for The Mutants (1998) at Cannes Film Festival. Villaverde has also filmed titles such as Water and Salt (2001), Swan (2011), or Colo (2017). The last film participated in the New Waves section in Seville Festival 2017.
What: the context of the Portuguese economic crisis, which provokes a family breakup, shows the disbanding of the values and the concept of the word ‘family’. It seems that Villaverde is trying to explain that the idea of family has disappeared and no longer exists. Colo is a sullen and bitter film, with more silence than explanations. This film is Villaverde’s latest fiction work so far.
Arabian Nights (Vol. 1, 2, 3) (2015)
Who: Miguel Gomes, 48 years old. He is one of the principal directors in Portuguese cinema. He debuted with the dazzling film A cara que mereces (2004), which was recovered by the SEFF last year in Melodías Excéntricas session. Furthermore, he has filmed Our Beloved Month of August (2008) and Tabu (2012). In an extraordinary bet on his films, Seville Festival 2015 included in its Official Section the three feature films of the trilogy: The Restless One, The Desolate One, and The Enchanted One.
What: Winner of the Giraldillo de Plata, Gomes’ trilogy helped him achieve two of his wishes: make a film based on a tale, and talk about what it meant to live in Portugal after the crisis marked by austerity. They are three autonomous but complementary films. They make an evident reference to Sheherezade’s classic tales and mark a turning point in Portuguese fiction films. Arabian Nights trilogy demonstrates the freedom of a relevant filmmaker.
Horse Money (2014)
Who: Pedro Costa, 62 years old. He is the heir of the documentalists of the sixties’ Portuguese group Novo cinema. Costa is an important author of the resistance and an innovator of experimental cinema and docufiction. He has 30 years of solid and relevant experience, since his debut with O Sangre/Blood (1989). This incorruptible and radical filmmaker produces a filmography that seems to be born from the shadows. Pedro Costa has also directed Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), Colossal Youth (2006), or the recently premiered Vitalina Varela (2019).
What: with an award for Best Direction in Locarno Film Festival, Horse Money is a circular and dark film about a Cape Verdean retiree —who already appeared in Colossal Youth—. He was admitted to a Lisbon hospital due to a nervous disease. Through this character, Costa talks about the nooks of the memory, pain, and failure caused by the Carnation Revolution. This film shows a tough and overwhelming cinema.
