Neil Young makes some intriguing discoveries in at the sixth IndieLisboa film festival in Portugal
The Festival Internacional de Cinema Independente – IndieLisboa for short – is, as its name promises, a fine showcase of international, independent cinema. But anyone visiting the event, whose sixth renewal was this spring, is missing out if all they do is see movies. Whereas there isn’t much else going on in, say, Rotterdam in January – ensuring attendees of that city’s major festival can routinely cram six or more films into days that start around 10am and finish after midnight – Lisbon in late spring is a different proposition entirely.
And the festival organisers certainly make it pretty easy for everyone to sample the delights of this ancient, beautiful, incredibly hilly capital. On most days, the first screening (apart from kiddie matinees) kicks off at 3pm. That said, many IndieLisboa-goers tend – in true Portuguese style – to rise late, having sampled the countless late-night options available, such as venerable city-centre cabaret-club Maxime’s on the Praça da Alegria.
In bygone days, Maxime’s denizens were often theatrical sorts from the nearby Parque Mayer – Lisbon’s mini-Broadway, which is now a ghostly shadow of its former self. There’s only one functioning theatre remaining. This is the Maria Vitória, whose gaudy frontage I’d walked past dozens of times before venturing beyond it into the Parque.
As one online commentator has noted, wandering the near-deserted Parque Mayer – an oasis of eerie calm right in the city’s heart – is “like being on a David Lynch film set”. The landscape is dominated by the once-majestic, now-dilapidated Cinema Capitolio, with the shells of old theatres here and there and a small street of shacks. The only sign of life – apart from the colony of semi-feral cats – is an excellent, small and family-run diner named Gina’s.
At the back of Gina’s is an overgrown pathway which, leads to the rear of the stunning Cinemateca Portugesa. One of Europe’s great, opulent temples of cinema, this is located in a former townhouse/mansion and, thanks to a generous government subsidy, the standard ticket price is a jaw-dropping €2.50. I caught a matinee of Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan in Raoul Walsh’s 1949 frontier Western Silver River – just the kind of thing that would have lit up the Capitolio in its prime. The latter is reportedly to form centrepiece of a redeveloped Parque Mayer, although the ambitious plans – involving America’s megastar architect Frank Gehry – are reportedly and mercifully on hold, due to financial and planning considerations.
I might never have stumbled across Parque Mayer if it had not been for Ruins (Ruinas), a new essay-documentary by Lisbon’s own Manuel Mozos. Now 50, Mozos is revered in local film circles – despite reportedly leaving most of his projects unfinished – and works as an archivist at the Cinemateca. Awarded the prize for Best Portuguese Film, Ruins is a fragmentary collage in which Mozos tours various locations in the country which have seen better days – abandoned houses, hospitals, hotels. These include Parque Mayer. Although it’s a touch too bitty and pretentious for my taste, with its narration a dense collage of poetic texts and the material perhaps overstretched, even at a running time of one hour, Ruins is a fine example of how cinema can lead us to explore the “real” world with fresh eyes .
If Ruins feels very much like a film made from a perspective of aged experience, Joao Rosas’s Birth of a City is decidedly a young man’s movie and none the worse for that. This debut feature of 28-year-old Rosas – another world premiere for IndieLisboa – is essentially a documentary with lightly fictional elements about a young Portuguese film-maker (heard but unseen) living in scruffy east London and wandering the streets with his camera.
During his peregrinations, he comes across a young French woman who paints imaginary cities. The creation of her latest canvas is intercut with images of the real London and also of Lisbon when the director visits home. Marked by a gentle, observant curiosity and a beguiling compositional eye that helps us digest Rosas’ stream of philosophical musings, Birth of a City is a kind of “Hackney Mon Amour” with a Patrick Keiller touch.
There’ll also be plenty of takers for Visionary Iraq, an ostentatiously transgressive assault on decency from the highly-
regarded Gabriel Abrantes, a 25-year-old American/Portuguese, here sharing nearly all duties on both sides of the camera with Benjamin Crotty. A deliberately artificial, mannered and melodramatic kaleidoscope of sibling incest, post-colonial guilt and the nefarious capitalist manipulations of the military-industrial complex, this packs more ideas and outrage into its 17 minutes than most features manage in 100.
Closer to home, Dublin-born Glaswegian Duncan Campbell takes a similarly confrontational approach with his experimental documentary Bernadette. This is an edgy and daringly unconventional portrait of 1970s Northern Irish politician Bernadette Devlin that sandwiches archive footage between much more radical and oblique opening and closing sections. Clocking in at 37 minutes, as a treatment of Northern Ireland’s recent history, Bernadette makes Steve McQueen’s Hunger look positively timid in comparison – even if not all of its bold gambits quite come off.
There was nothing quite so bold among the new features on show. Among a strong competition, I’d already seen and liked the main prize-winner, Lance Hammer’s hard-hitting American indie Ballast at Berlin last year, and had caught the new Argentinian films, Mariano de Rosa’s terrific Green Waters and Celina Murga’s A Week Alone, at Berlin (2009) and Vienna respectively.
The pick of the new discoveries was Breathless, an audacious gangster thriller by writer-director-star Yang Ik-June. Although a bit long and a touch slow here and there, it’s easy to see why this uncompromisingly violent, exceedingly foul-mouthed tale of an amoral small-time hoodlum and the schoolgirl he befriends became one of the “buzz” pictures at Rotterdam in January. It looks a safe bet to be the next big cult hit from the febrile cinematic hotbed that is East Asia.
