30/09/2025 - The Portuguese festival returns from 16 to 26 October, screening more than 200 films including the newest works by Carlos Conceição, Salomé Lamas and Rita Azevedo Gomes

Doclisboa has announced this year’s programme, consisting of screenings of 211 films from 54 countries. Unspooling from 16 to 26 October, this will be the festival’s first year under Hélder Beja’s directorship, with Boris Nelepo and Cecilia Barrionuevo appointed as programme heads. Kamal Aljari’s With Hasan in Gaza [+see also:
film review
interview: Kamal Aljafari
film profile] is the event’s opening film.

Out of the 39 world premieres spanning this year’s programme, seven are part of the International Competition: Vadim Kostrov’s Towards the Light (France), Victoria Hely-Hutchinson’s Vacances (USA/France), Mahmoud Massad’s Cinema Kawakeb (Jordan/Qatar/Netherlands), Angela Summereder’s B for Bartleby (Austria), Giorgos Athanasiou’s The Anything (Greece), Ebrû Avci’s Tell Me a Fairy Tale (Turkey), and, lastly, Nate Lavey’s The Strongest Lightning Strikes Not From Dark Skies (USA). The International Competition has a total of 12 films and also includes Fabrice Aragno’s Locarno competitor The Lake [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fabrice Aragno
film profile] (Switzerland), Isabel Pagliai’s Fantasy (France), Fábio Rogério and Wesley Pereira de Castro’s One Minute Is an Eternity for Those Who Are Suffering (Brazil); Ignacio Agüero’s Letters to My Dead Parents (Chile); and Ezequiel Salinas and Ramiro Sonzini’s The Night Is Fading Away (Argentina).

The National Competition is composed of the same number of films (and world premieres), divided, in this instance, into three shorts and nine features, and comprising seven world premieres. This vast and diverse programme will screen Maureen Fazendeiro’s Locarno competitor The Seasons [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maureen Fazendeiro
film profile], Rita Azevedo Gomes’ FIDMarseille winner Fuck the Polis, Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ Locarno-premiered Nova ‘78 [+see also:
film review
film profile], João Miller Guerra’s FIDMarseille-premiered Complô, and Maria Clara Escobar’s Gil, Let’s Explode São Paulo; and it will host the world premieres of Carlos Conceição’s Tiger Bay, Salomé Lamas’ Gold and Ashes, André Guiomar’s Ku Handza and Hiroatsu Suzuki and Rossana Torres’ Água Mãe, as well as short films Andar com Fé by Duarte Coimbra, Firewood by Manel Raga Raga, and Three of Cups by Mário Macedo and Enotea. And it’s not only in this section that Portuguese works are appearing: the festival is set to screen no fewer than 31 national productions. The Green Years competition - for new directors and/or school films - features some of those productions among its 22 international short films.

In terms of the non-competitive sections, the New Visions line-up has also been announced and comprises several sub-sections: the Invited Director line-up (featuring Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux, and Hala Elkoussy), Shadowboxing (dedicated to Palestine), Dark Star (with two films directed by Jacques Meilleurat and Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night), The Photographer’s Clairvoyance - From 1875 to 2025 (linking two contemporary films to “The Adventures of Gabriel Veyre Around the World”) and Other New Visions, amongst many other offerings.

The festival has already announced a retrospective dedicated to William Greaves (co-curated with Scott MacDonald), as well the Heart Beat section (relating to different artistic expressions) and a line-up entitled From the Earth to the Moon (described as a “cinematic journey around the Planet, where each film is woven from the same fabric that binds us: memory and life”). This last section includes the newest works by Lucrecia Martel (Landmarks [+see also:
film review
interview: Lucrecia Martel
film profile]), Werner Herzog (Ghost Elephants), Laura Poitras and Mark Oberhausen (Cover-Up), Ross McElwee (Remake) and Želimir Žilnik (Eighty Plus [+see also:
film review
interview: Želimir Žilnik
film profile]), to name just a few, and the latest titles to have joined this line-up come courtesy of Pedro Florêncio, Welket Bungué, João Vieira Torres, Abbas Fahdel, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi and Masao Adachi.

This year’s edition of the festival will be closed by Eugène Green’s The Tree of Knowledge [+see also:
film review
film profile].