PARALLEL PROGRAM

This was now 88'
SAT, 18 JUL, 9:45pm - Teatro Municipal de Vila do Conde (Sala 2)

Why Colonel Bunny was Killed
Miranda Pennell

UK, 2010, 28’

Triggered by the memoirs of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands, the film is constructed from archive photographs of colonial life on the North West Frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. Searching for clues at the margins of images framed in the midst of resistance to colonial rule, the film plays sound against image and finds striking continuities in British portrayals of a distant place and people.

The Host
Miranda Pennell
UK, 2015, 60’

A filmmaker turns forensic detective as she pieces together hundreds of photographs in search of what she believes to be a buried history, only to find herself inside the story she is researching. The Host investigates the activities of British Petroleum (BP) in Iran; a tale of power, imperial hubris and catastrophe. While the tectonic plates of geopolitical conspiracy shift in the background, the film asks us to look, and look again, at images produced by the oil company, together with personal photos taken by its British staff in Iran– including the filmmaker’s parents– not for what they show, but for what they betray. The Host is about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, the facts and fictions we live by – and their consequences.

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We moved like this 72'
SUN, 19 JUL, 8:00pm - Teatro Municipal de Vila do Conde (Sala 2)

Human Radio
Miranda Pennell
Reino Unido, 2005, 9’

People dance in private moments of personal abandon across London in the summer of 2001. The film is the result of the director’s work with the first ten respondents to a local newspaper advertisement that she placed seeking ‘living-room dancers’ – people who love to dance behind closed doors.

You made me love you
Mirannda Pennell
UK, 2005, 3’30''

Twenty-one dancers play a game of cat and mouse with an unpredictable camera. Losing contact can be traumatic.

Tattoo
Miranda Pennell
UK, 2001, 9’

Trees and wildlife look-on as the countryside is invaded by a lost regiment of soldiers engaged in a repetitive display. The ritual of military drill is by turns absurd and sinister. The soldiers of the Light Division perform a choreography that has been perfected and aestheticized in order to serve a function: to be effective. To transforming many bodies into a single body, and to mesmerize onlookers with their ‘stunning’ unity.

Fisticuffs

Miranda Pennell

UK , 2004, 11’ 

A bloke walks into a pub…

Six actors punch, kick and wrestle their way through the Wild West of an East London drinking establishment. The ritual of the Western bar-brawl, is re-located to a London working mens’ club. The violence appears to have no consequences, the actors’ bodies being as rubbery and invulnerable as those in the TV Westerns that inspired the film.

Magnetic North

Miranda Pennell

UK, 2003, 8’30’’

Adolescent rituals are played out across the wintry landscapes of small-town Finland. A teenage girl skates on a frozen lake, while a teenage boy poses with a guitar in his room. Adolescent dreams and yearning.

Don’t Cry (NIE PLACZ)

Grzegorz Królikiewicz

Polond, 1972, 8’30’’

Submitting to the energies of the beyond, the body is the route to some kind of freedom. The power of the collective, rhythm, bodily movements and alcoholic substances help us on our way. Beautiful and ugly, creative and destructive. The last day and night of freedom before they join the army, Poland 1972. Krolikiewicz’s films were frequently censored at the time he made them.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore 

Mark Leckey

UK, 1999, 14’44’’

Leckey spliced altered video footage from dance clubs with an amalgamation of sounds to examine countercultural nightlife, revealing the poignant interpersonal energy among and socio-economic aspirations of its revelers. The video is sourced from footage of British clubs that spans trends in fashion and attitude from the 1970s to the 1990s. Despite the differences among the partygoers, Leckey’s film unites the disparate cultural moments in a frenzy of youthful, euphoric ritual. Tongue in cheek, the title alludes to Italian fashion house Fiorucci, wildly popular during the artist’s youth in the late ’70s. Although dress and taste evolve through Leckey’s edited juxtapositions, brand allegiance and material symbolism are undeniable constants in an otherwise fleeting remix of three decades of dance culture.

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Carte Blanche 1 90'
TER, 21 JUL, 22:00 - Teatro Municipal de Vila do Conde (Sala 2)

Intersecting Memory

Shayma Awawdeh

Palestine, France, 2025, 21'

Personal memory added to incredible archive films of 2nd intifada. Personal memories and collective trauma intertwine to form a powerful portrait of a childhood lived under occupation, offering a perspective on the present and the future. The film is dedicated to Shayma’s mother, who taught her to cherish the scent of almond blossoms in spring, and to all the mothers of Palestine. (IDFA)

Running Light

Lis Rhodes

UK, 1996, 15'

The farms thirty odd years ago were not that large. The farmers were white . They were armed. The soundtrack was recorded in 1985. Minimal photographs were taken because of endangering or exploiting the migrants further.

The Ban

Roisin Agnew

Ireland, UK, 2024, 26’

30 years after the IRA ceasefire in Northern Ireland, this experimental archive film looks at Margaret Thatcher's farcical broadcasting ban that saw actors hired to dub those associated with terrorism. ‘The Ban’ is a sharp case study in censorship and resistance with disturbing echoes in the present.

Womannightfilm

Lee Anne Schmitt

US, 2015, 7’

A meditation. The menace of night and the memory of trauma.A film about violence and the trace it leaves.There is a woman that watches me, who watches me from her window.She watches me.

Every night she watches me. Until one night, she is gone. Shot on 16mm over a number of years, the film rephotographs and rephotographs, until the image itself is a ghost. It is a moment in time, and then that moment is gone.

Via Dolorosa

Oraib Toukan

Palestina, EUA, 2021, 7'

Footage shot by the late Palestinian photographer and cinematographer, Hani Jawharieh, slowed-down, studied, and re-assembled with material from where it was found—piles of film reels discarded by former Soviet cultural centers in Amman, Jordan, accompanied with commentary by feminist literary and film scholar Nadia Yaqub. Via Dolorosa (Latin for the Arabic 'Way of Suffering') is itself a processional route that Jawharieh filmed in his birth city of Jerusalem.

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Carte Blanche 2 70'
QUI, 23 JUL, 20:00 - Teatro Municipal de Vila do Conde (Sala 2)

The Three Disappearances of Suad Hosni
Rania Stephan

A rapturous elegy to a rich era of Egyptian film production, through the work of one of its most revered actress and star: Soad Hosni, who embodied the modern Arab woman in her complexity, pieced exclusively from VHS footage of her films. Irreverent, playful, marvellous and serious, “The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni” underscores the saving grace of fiction.

More information about the film program at www.festival.curtas.pt.