//

Doclisboa 2022: Cinema As Resistance

Many of the films at this year’s Doclisboa were meditations on colonial oppression, environmental degradation, and resurgent imperial warmongering.

When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories
Photo: Doclisboa

In our image-saturated contemporary era, where new visual platforms and formats are introduced at such an accelerated clip that it can be hard to remember how things looked just a couple of years ago, the venerable documentary film is taking on an increasingly crucial preservative function. For better or worse, we can always rely on 24-hour social media surveillance to show us something of the way things are in the present. Many of the best documentaries at this year’s Doclisboa preferred to cast their gaze back to see how we got to where we are today, or to imagine where we might be heading in the future.

Taking place in Lisbon over 10 days, Doclisboa presented a broad array of themes and styles, with films made by established and emerging creators from all over the world. As usual, many of the homegrown entries sought to engage with some of the darkest chapters of Portugal’s history, presenting a number of films that examined the legacy of its colonial period.

Welket Bungué’s Calling Cabral and Mónica de Miranda’s The Island each offer a multi-layered reckoning with colonialism and its continuing impact—the former through a kind of interpretive dance traced through city streets in the African nation of Guinea-Bissau, and the latter through the narration of a new utopian mythology, staging the hopes, dreams, and memories of a handful of archetypal characters in an idyllic natural setting.

Advertisement

Meanwhile, César Pedro’s Silences is composed of mostly decontextualized snapshots of life in and around a Catholic church in the town of Uige, Angola. Though its approach is more observational than the latter two films, it also features moments of imaginative space. One brief shot of a large crucifix illuminated against a darkened interior hints at the interplay between presence and absence that animates many works of post-colonial art.

A similar blend of quotidian reality and affecting lyricism is present throughout Maria Simões and Tiago Melo Bento’s Luana, a short film set in the isolated community of Cabo Polonio in Uruguay. The eponymous girl is one of the few children remaining in this coastal spot, which functions as a utopian experiment in communal existence. A handful of inhabitants live seemingly in a harmonious relationship with the local flora and fauna, withstanding the elements without running water or electricity, and clinging on admirably in the face of an encroaching modern world. The child’s-eye view is one of the most overused devices in the world of documentary film, but it’s still an engaging and impactful one, particularly when it’s introducing the viewer to an unfamiliar milieu such as this. The close-up attention to detail and elegiac beauty of Luana’s cinematography made it a low-key highlight of the festival.

Gastón Sahajdacny’s Moto is another film looking out the world through youthful eyes, in this case a group of teens coming of age in the Argentinian city of Cordoba. With an impressionistic style and only the barest hints of a narrative, it explores adolescent relationships and aspirations, as well as examining the struggle to make ends meet in an environment that’s growing increasingly hostile toward its younger population. Footage of protests against wealth inequality and police violence are intercut with some stunning nighttime scenery in this richly textured portrait of a city growing and evolving uneasily.

Advertisement

The Visit and a Secret Garden is another story of imagination in defiance of dominant social forces, but this time from the point of view of someone approaching the end of their life. Irene M. Borregros’s film revolves around a frank, often confrontational, discussion with Isabel Santalo, the filmmaker’s great-aunt, to whom she’s often compared by her relatives. Santalo was an artist in her youth, and claims to have been recognized and patronized by major international institutions, though the majority of her paintings were apparently sold some time ago.

Santalo’s uncompromising attitude and unconventional artistic ambitions brought about a rift between her and her family, and the woman seems to have grown increasingly bitter and defensive over the years. Some time after her uncomfortable interview with Santalo, Borregros was eventually able to recognize the older woman as an inspirational figure determined to make it on her own terms as a female artist in Portugal’s patriarchal society of the 1960s and ’70s. Toward the end of the film, a rudimentary display of her vision and creative process is juxtaposed effectively with a shot of the rainy streets outside the window of her humble apartment building, illustrating the costs of her having lived life exactly on her own terms.

When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories
Alvin Curran in a scene from Éric Baudelaire’s When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories © Doclisboa

Taking a much more indirect approach to its political subject matter is When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories, a collection of three films by Franco-American video artist Éric Baudelaire and set to the music of composer and improviser Alvin Curran. The first film opens with fragmented shots of seemingly innocuous urban scenery accompanied by an eerie musique concrete pierce, alongside subtitles that elliptically recount a gang-related murder that apparently took place on the streets of Rome in broad daylight. A kind of true-crime documentary deconstructed to the point of abstraction, it was followed by an account of Curran’s personal backstory and experimental approach to music, suggesting ideas of chaos and disruption emerging spontaneously in everyday environments.

Advertisement

Though much of the festival’s program was dedicated to memories and excavations of the past, it was a markedly contemporary story that ended up gaining the highest accolades. Judges for the City of Lisbon award for best international film handed the prize to Date in Minsk, the latest playful work of docu-fiction from young Belarus filmmaker Nikita Lavretski. Using a neat metatextual premise as an effective way to introduce tension into a deceptively simple scenario, the film delves into some of the darker recesses of its creator’s psyche, while also touching on the troubled history and uncertain future of his homeland.

Taking place in real time with one seemingly unbroken shot, the film follows a casual first date between Lavretski and a woman named Volha, who shares some of his cultural passions and his bleak, provocative sense of humor. Though they portray strangers who met via Tinder, the pair have in reality been a couple for almost eight years. Each regularly references their “ex” in conversation as a way of calling out the other’s real-life flaws and shortcomings, conducting a post-mortem on a failing, dysfunctional relationship that sometimes lapsed into physical abuse, while also suggesting the potential for a brighter future through brutal emotional honesty.

Sometimes resembling a pessimistic, zero-budget reimagining of Before Sunrise for terminally online and depressed millennials in the Eastern bloc, Date in Minsk takes a sprawling nighttime tour of the titular city, starting out in a dingy pool hall before traversing some uncomfortably dimly lit streets toward a historic, picturesque town square. Parallels are suggested between the rocky relationship that neither party has any inclination to break off and the violent, repressive post-Soviet nation that they continue to call home. While Lavretski stubbornly insists that he won’t leave, he mentions several friends who have emigrated to Poland or Ukraine, taking advantage of the improved artistic opportunities available there.

Advertisement

Though the leads’ insularity and borderline narcissism can grate a little at times, their dialogue tackles a variety of local and global socio-political issues in surprising depth without sacrificing its naturalism or spontaneity. It’s an impressive example of what can still be achieved on film with next to no resources, relying on the unaffected earnestness of two young performers and some relatively accomplished handheld camera movement to maintain a sense of dynamism.

Between its meditations on colonial oppression, environmental degradation, and resurgent imperial warmongering, many of the films at this year’s Doclisboa had a relatively mournful tone, reflecting the current political climate as well as the generally diminished authority of the documentary in our cultural conversation. With this came a renewed focus on the flaws and fractured nature of individuals and communities. But through highly specific personal testimony and idiosyncratic creative expression, it became possible to see how these aspects could be accepted and embraced, and to see a kind of power in this gesture. It remains a crucial tool of resistance, in a world in which so many seem to be feeling outpaced and dislocated.

Doclisboa runs from October 6—16.

David Robb

David Robb is originally from the north of England. A fiction writer, he recently moved back to London after living in Montreal for three years.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.