As Doclisboa returns for its 20th edition (unspooling from 6-16 October), Arché, a space for thinking and creative development, is also back. This year, for its eighth edition, 12 film projects have been selected to form part of a ten-day programme. Cineuropa talked to Ana Pereira, Arché’s coordinator, to get to know this strand of the festival a little better.

Cineuropa: This is Arché’s eighth edition. What originally prompted the first steps towards creating this space for projects in development?
Ana Pereira: Arché was created in 2015 by a team that had been working together for at least two years. There was this feeling that the festival should become more than just a place for screenings. Our mission also had to be about supporting directors with the projects that they were developing. Since every year, the festival hosts distributors and producers who come here to watch films, we thought that we could use some of those synergies to offer a space to enhance the visibility of the projects. There was also this feeling of a lack of a space for directors and producers to share their doubts about their in-development projects, to create a dialogue about them. So why not create this space for encounters ourselves? That’s how it all started.

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A lot of projects have been part of Arché since it started. Catarina Vasconcelos’ The Metamorphosis of Birds [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Catarina Vasconcelos
fiche film] is one of the many examples, also in terms of films that had a strong festival run. In light of this, how do you see Arché’s growth over the years?
Our initial motivation was to really build a working space. Over time, we worked on strengthening that side of creating opportunities to get those projects better known. We now have a pitching session and a moment for individual meetings with professionals, besides the workshops, as we realised that it was crucial to consolidate this space dedicated to enhancing visibility. What we now observe is that it’s going pretty well! Which means that, in fact, every year there is a bigger number of people who want to come to Doclisboa to get to know the projects we select for Arché. We have more and more people wanting to have meetings with these projects, from producers who might have an interest in co-producing to distributors who might want to become distributing partners. That has had an effect when it comes to the films’ own paths once they’re finished. So we can say that, overall, we have more projects, and a higher number of completed ones as well.

This year, you have 12 projects in development, as well as three research projects, involving a total of ten countries. What can you tell us about them?
There’s one thing we do at Doclisboa that also applies here: we always aim for a plural selection, in terms of the projects’ language, their origin and topics. That diversity is pretty clear if we look at the directors’ nationalities, as well as the producing and co-producing countries. This year, there is a set of more intimate stories, in which the directors are coming from their own personal experience. Then we have projects that are more politically engaged, bringing us clear visions of the state of the world. We have a project made by an indigenous director, whose previous works were screened at Doclisboa.

That means that people are coming back to the festival but in a different way: with new projects, in development.
Definitely! Then we also have a co-directed Portuguese project that doesn’t come from the cinematic world. The directors are journalists, not filmmakers. So this year, we also have that sort of variety, with a project that comes from a more classical tone, or let’s say a more classical way of approaching the more traditional documentary vocabulary. It’s wonderful to work with this mix, especially when it comes to the labs.

Arché is part of Doclisboa’s Nebulae, the festival’s industry section. What sort of activities are planned for this edition?
Arché has the same core programme and essence: development labs, working sessions, a pitching session and meetings. The participants can join in with other Nebulae activities. We have a programme called “Guest Country”, in which we have pitching sessions for projects from a country we invite each year (this year with projects from France, with the support of Unifrance). And then we try to build bridges, presenting a project from countries that were previously invited (in this case, we have Croatia, Georgia and Germany). Then we have a sort of “constellation” programme, as we call it, dubbed “Let’s Pitch”, which consists of a master class on strategies to adapt a public presentation depending on the project. These are just a few examples, but this goes to show that besides Arché, the participants – and other elements of the industry – can work and be part of other activities.