DocLisboa begins today with Edgar Pera film and without forgetting Gaza

O film festival Doclisboa begins today with Edgar Pêra’s film “Warrilha no Asphalto”, in an edition that will feature among the guests the journalist and Palestinian lawyer Basel Adra, co-director of “No Other Land”.

Almost serving 25 editions, Doclisboa will show nearly 200 films from 51 countries, including 32 Portuguese films, “through geographies, generations and different ways of making and thinking about cinema”.

“The Doclisboa is a marching festival, a story to write” and that “no longer understands the documentary as a genre or a cerrado territory”, supports the direction on the official page.

It opens with “Warrilha no Asphalto”, by Edgar Pêra, which part of Manuel Ricardo Sousa’s homonymous book on the FP-25 and mixes the director’s memories over the 1980s.

The program includes the cinema of names such as Denis Cotê, Avi Mograbi, Jia Zhangke, Mariano Llinás and French filmmaker Alain Cavalier, with the film “Thanks for Coming”, a kind of farewell at the end of the festival.

The Portuguese competition has 11 films, short films and long films, all of them at world premiere, such as “People and Power”, by Ico Costa, which portrays Mozambique in the presidential elections of 2024, and “The Voice of All – Jornal do Fundão”, by Manuel Mozos.

In the international competition is “13 Pinnetes”, film that João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata made to order BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts.

In Lisbon will be German filmmaker Monica Maurer and French filmmaker Aude Fourel, focusing on Palestine. The first “dedicated much of her life to document the Palestinian struggle”, while the second “filmed her working with her archives”.

At the festival there will be still the filmmaker, journalist and Palestinian lawyer Basel Adra, to talk about “No Other Land”, who correlated with Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (these two co-authors of the documentary “Naza”), and who won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2025.

“ In a world at war, in a country where our freedoms are under threat and democracy under attack, in a daily life where the discourse of hatred, exclusion and the extreme right is normalized, we believe in a festival where curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, the meeting and the debate of ideas remain very vivid”, stresses the direction of the festival.

The films “Knife: The attempted waller of Salman Rushdie”, by Alex Gibney, “Elza”, by Eryk Rocha, about the Brazilian singer Elza Soares, “In this Room”, in which Ana Rocha de Sousa follows the fadista Carminho on tour of Japan, and “Esta Vida de Marinheiro”, by Paulo Miguel Antunes, which recalls the route of musician João Cantela, are other proposals of the festival.

The 24th Doclisboa takes place until the 25th in Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa, Cinema Ideal and Centro de Arte Moderna of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, where a performance is expected, in the context of the retrospective dedicated to Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka (1939-1991).