Doclisboa has announced the programme for its 24th edition, which will unspool between 15 and 25 October. This year, the festival presents 198 films from 51 countries, 34 of which are world premieres and 13 international premieres. In this overarching line-up, the gathering has selected 32 Portuguese movies.

One of the latter is this year’s opening feature: Edgar Pêra’s Asphalt Guerrilla, which had its world premiere at Locarno. There’s also a Portuguese feature in this year’s International Competition: 13 Alfinetes, directed by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata. It is one of the seven world premieres among the 11-film selection for this competition, which also boasts three international and one European premiere. Three movies are French productions: Isabelle Prim’s Memoirs of a Badger, Éric Baudelaire’s For the Moon and Jacques Meilleurat’s The Centaur. Other European productions include Rayna Teneva’s Geography Is Destiny (Germany/Bulgaria/Austria), and a film helmed by Nikita Lavretski and Sergey Kolosovski, Smarty (Lithuania). The full list includes films by Thunska Pansittivorakul, Paula Gaitán, Mariano Donoso Makowski, Kasia Mich, Dani Correia and Ghassan Salhab.

The Portuguese Competition is composed of shorts and features, and all of its 11 films are having their world premieres. Among the selected features, two are co-productions with France and Mozambique: Ico Costa’s Povo e Poder (Portugal/France/Mozambique) and Pedro Neves’ Os Continuadores da Revolução (Portugal/Mozambique/France). The feature selection also comprises The Morning Wind (Portugal) by Cláudia Ribeiro (a film that was featured in last year’s Showcase of Portuguese Projects, part of the festival’s Nebulae industry events), Visitas de uma Parente Afastada (Portugal) by Inês Oliveira and Manuel Mozos’ A Voz de todos - Jornal do Fundão (Portugal).

The short films in this competitive section include the new works by Raul Domingues, Inês Sapeta Dias, Maria Novo, André Santos Martins, Maxime Martinot and Fábio Penela. The festival’s competitive section dedicated to emerging filmmakers, Verdes Anos, also has five Portuguese flicks among its selection of 11 short films, with an overall count of seven world premieres.

One of the out-of-competition sections is Da Terra à Lua, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2026, and where “cinema, history and politics converge in films that question images and what they reveal about past and present”. In this 42-film selection, there’s a tribute to Patricio Guzmán, with a screening of the Chilean filmmaker’s final movie, 2022’s My Imaginary Country. There’s also a focus on Palestine and the works of Aude Fourel and Monica Maurer, as well as another one on Miguel Antunes Ramos, amongst many other titles.

The New Visions section, which “explores the possibilities of cinema as an art form intimately connected to the experience of the present”, showcases a rich variety of films. There are programmes dedicated to two guest filmmakers, Sophie Roger and John Torres, while the overall selection presents works by Ben Russell, Declan Clarke, Denis Côté, Lee Anne Schmitt, Lynne Sachs, Lucía Seles, María Aparicio and Ted Fendt, among many others. Also included is a tribute to Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, with a screening of Oh! Man.

The festival is also organising the Heart Beat section (dedicated to several forms of artistic expression, ranging from literature to performance) and a retrospective on Lino Brocka, curated by Khavn De La Cruz. Alain Cavalier’s Thanks for Coming (France), which premiered in this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, has been selected as the closing film.

The full programme, including information on the Nebulae industry activities, is available on Doclisboa’s website.