Extension of Doclisboa returns to Macau with documentary show

A extension of the Doclisboa 2025 returns to Macao between November 5th and 19th with the presentation of ten documentaries, including works of the winners of the local shorts festival, announced today the Portuguese Institute of the East (IPOR).

“By integrating in the programming the films presented in the competitions of 2025 of DocLisboa and the Macau International Short Festival, the IPOR enriches the cultural offer of the city, crossing remarkable works of the contemporary documentary of the West and the East and reaffirming the cultural identity of Macau”, reads a message from the director of IPOR, Patricia Quaresma, in the program today released.

The opening of the festival, on November 5, will be dedicated to three distinguished works at the Macau International Short Festival.

Chan Chon Sin’s “Nuptial Flight” accompanies a “man of graceful movements” that began one day “to see his eye orbits filled with irregular shadows that did not disappear,” reads the program.

Already “The Macau Development”, Zhang Linliang, focuses on the personal experience and creation of photographer Chen Xianyao, based in Macau. Already in “In Orbit Without You”, Leong Hou Wang brings to the big screen the life of the “Banca aunt”, owner of a local store.

On this first day it is still possible to watch António Sanmarful’s documentary “Maneiras”, about “the remarkable history inherent to three emblematic buildings designed” in Macao by architect José Maneiras (1935-2025).

The program also includes “Explode São Paulo, Gil”, by Brazilian director Maria Clara Escobar, who will be in Macau for the festival. This Portuguese-Brazilian production tells about Gil's career, who dreams of being a singer and moves to São Paulo, where he works as a domestic.

“Maria Clara proposes to make a film about her. Gil becomes famous and they explode two cities and reflect on dreams, work and forgetfulness ", refers to the program.

“The Stations”, by Luso-francesa Maureen Farmer, combines testimonies of rural workers and field notes of a couple of archaeologists, amateur archive images and scientific drawings, legends and poems and songs to form “a journey through the real and invented history” of Alentejo “and the peoples who lived there”.

“The revolutionary brigades in the struggle against the dictatorship”, by Luiz Gobern Lopes, “The Riso and the Knife”, by Pedro Pinho, and “Bulanka”, by Leonor Engaged are the other works of Portuguese filmmakers that are included in the programming of this edition of the extension to Macau do Doclisboa 2025.

“Bulanka” accompanies Filipino women who “today face a new form of colonization, forced migration by work”, refers also in the presentation, where it is described that thousands of Filipino women work as maids and caretakers in foreign countries, “sustaining foreign economies while leaving their own families behind”.

The film now arrives in Macau, where lives a large migrant community from this country of Southeast Asia.

Still part of the festival, is the work of the Franco-American Eugène Green “The Tree of Knowledge”, a fable about Gaspar, a teenager from the suburbs of Lisbon who falls into the hands of the Ogre, a man who made a pact with the devil and uses the boy to attract tourists, turning them into animals to slaughter them, a “critique not always veiled by the way the city surrendered to tourism”, reads in the presentation of this work on the Doclisbo portal.