UnionDocs presents and on Jury at Doclisboa 2015

by Cecilie Joerck

Cíntia Gil, Festival Director at Doclisboa A festival is an imagined place, made of unique materializations of worlds that are also imagined, full of chance encounters that transform.

doc lisboa 1

October 22th – November 1st 2015 marked the 13th edition of Doclisboa, the renowned Portuguese international film festival for documentaries.

Executive Artistic Director, Christopher Allen, participated with the festival this year with a presentation of the UnionDocs production Living Los Sures , and as a juror for the Portuguese and First Feature competition alongside Jasmin Basic and Eloy Enciso.

Below, the award-winners and special mentions that were highlighted from the festival:

PRÉMIO LISCONT PARA MELHOR FILME DA COMPETIÇÃO PORTUGUESA / Liscont Award for Best Portuguese Competition

Rio Corgo
Maya Kosa, Sérgio da Costa

A heartfelt portrait of the rural world, humorous and far from sentimental, full of humanism and reminding us of the most significant Portuguese and classical cinema, this film has captured the jury’s heart for the beautiful and playful way it shows us that our identity is built by the sum of reality and its mythical construction.

rio corgo

Íngreme Portuguese Competition Jury Award

Talvez Deserto Talvez Universo
Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes

This delicate approach to the confined and vulnerable is as necessary for what it frames out as what it focuses upon. By not reducing complexity to simple binaries and avoiding all-too-easy condescension, this film builds a intimate sense of time and offers a progressive intersubjectivity that should challenge certainties and barriers in our minds. talvez deserto

Honorable mention of the jury of the Portuguese competition

Setil
Tiago Siopa

Exploring the railway universe, the film offers a fascinating reflection on places as containers of memory, trains and journey as cinema imaginary, and night as a space for dream and myth. This first feature reveals the formal and narrative potential of a filmmaker who believes in the strength of the cinematographic language.

Setil

Íngreme Universities Jury Award For for Best First Feature

Dead Slow Ahead
Mauro Herce

An exploration of a world out of space and time, where man seems to disappear, swallowed by the power of merciless machines. In this impressive first feature, the soundscape creates an abstract and mesmerizing sensorial territory capturing both the protagonists and the spectators.

dead slow ahead

 

Special Mention for Best First Feature

88:88
Isiah Medina

For the actual experiment, for the proposal that a new cinema language may not only be attempted, it is in fact necessary in order to excavate a new collective crisis in narrative. The super cut, the interruption, the stutter, the glitch, the gap, the over-shared and over-exposed, makes a rejection of more than conventional taste, it breaks the connection between everyday philosophy and cinematic thinking**, leaving its familiar, emotional material bare and un-sublimated. Why not?

88-88