Five days of digital film

22/06/2006

Announced as the first European event exclusively dedicated to digital format, the Lisbon Village Festival officially opened last night with the screening of Um ano mais longo (lit. "A Longer Year") by Portuguese director Marco Martins (Alice [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marco Martins
interview: Nuno Lopes
film profile], see focus).

Produced by Renzo Barsotti, one of the directors of the Festival Sete Sóis Sete Luas, Um ano mais longo marks the first collaboration between Alice's helmer and legendary 83 year-old Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who has written some of the films by Antonioni, Fellini, Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos, among others.

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The film follows the life of a man (Gonçalo Waddington) who returns to Lisbon after living in Paris for 10 years, to visit his dying father. He then meets a young Asian girl who shows him another city parallel to the Lisbon we tend to see on the surface. Martins has already announced that the collaboration with Guerra is to be continued in a new feature film.

Um ano mais longo, however, is far from being the only curious offering at the new festival, which, after having received over 1,300 submissions, will screen a total of nine short films and 19 features through next Sunday. One of the most anticipated titles of the programme is Steven Soderbergh's Bubble, the first film in history to be simultaneously released in theatres, on DVD and VOD (video on demand).

The European features in competition include Miguel Ángel Carcano's En Ninguna Parte (Spain), Giorgio Diritti's Il vento fa suo giro (Italy), Bijan Daneshmand's A Snake's Tail (UK), Nuno Jardim and Hugo Diogo's Incógnito (Portugal) and German title Your Happiness Depends On Me by Soeren Senn (see interview).