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The sixth edition of the Macau Portuguese Film Festival will be held at the end of the month, from June 28 to 30, at the auditorium of the Portuguese Consulate General in Macau and Hong Kong. Highlights include the screening of the latest films by Portuguese director João Canijo, Mal Viver and Viver Mal. Festival curator Margarida Moz stressed the local interest in Portuguese films, not just within the Portuguese community.
Film lovers can admire a poster at the end of the month that showcases the best of Portugal’s recent achievements in this field. The 6th Portuguese Film Festival will be held from June 28 to 30 in the Dr. Stanley Ho Auditorium of the Portuguese Consulate General in Macau and Hong Kong, with a screening of Mal Viver at 7pm on the first day, directed by Portuguese director João Canijo, who won the “Silver Bear” award at the Berlin International Film Festival last year, one of the most important awards in this competition. Also worth noting is the Portuguese Film Academy’s Sofia Award for “Best Film”.
The next day, June 29, “Viver Mal”, also by João Canijo, will be staged. Both films are the result of 12 weeks of filming at the Rio Park Hotel in Ofir, in the city of Esposende, in early 2021, when the country was going through the second phase of the pandemic lockdown.
“Viver Mal” “tells the story of a family of several women from different generations whose lives are torn apart by resentment and resentment, which is shattered by the unexpected arrival of their granddaughter at the weekend,” if in the synopsis. “Viver Mal” continues in parallel, focusing on the guests who pass through the hotel managed by these women.
The cast includes Rita Blanco, Anabela Moreira, Maddalena Almeida, Cleia Almeida, Vera Barreto, Filipa Areosa, Leonor Silveira, Nuno López, Rafael Morais, Lia Carvalho, Beatriz Batada, Leonor Vasconcelos and Carolina Amaral.
Margarida Moz, the festival’s curator and director of Portugal’s International Film Office, told HM that Caniho’s film “marks the last year of Portuguese cinema.”
“Despite the success that João Canijo had already achieved in our country, his resume lacked choices that adequately reflected his enormous talent. Justice has finally been done with the selection of these two films to the 2023 Berlin Film Festival, with Mal Viver winning the Silver Bear. From here, the film traveled around the world and premiered commercially (that is, outside the regular cinemas, festival circuit) in several countries, including 31 cities in France.”
Therefore, “bringing these two films to Macau is a way of demonstrating the high standard of this exhibition, showing the world the best of Portuguese cinema”.
Margarida Moz also stressed that in the region “the interest in Portuguese cinema is not limited to the local Portuguese community, but is shared by a community of cinephiles who follow the programming of the best international film festivals so they can see these films in the theatres”.
Two-day shorts
On June 29, the first session dedicated to short film screenings will start at 5 pm. These include Laura Carreira’s “Transformation”, screened at the 2020 Venice Film Festival; “Blue”, directed by Ágata de Pinho, screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2022, and “Being a Medieval Man”, directed by Isadora Neves Marques, winner of the Tigre Award for Best Short Film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival 2022.
Also included is As Lágrimas de Adrian, directed by Miguel Moraes Cabral, which will be screened at the Independent Lisboa Film Festival from 2023, and À Tona da Água, directed by Alexander David, which was screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year.
On the last day of the festival, there was time and space for another screening of short films, including Catarina Vasconcelos’s Nocturno para uma Floresta , which was first screened at the Locarno International Film Festival last year.
The public can also see Corte by Alfonso and Bernardo Rapazot, screened at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival; Morning Shadows by Rita Cruchinho Neves; and Let It Work by Daniel Soares, which will be screened at the 2022 Locarno International Film Festival.
Finally, we present Shorroms, a short film by Jorge Jacom, winner of the Best Short Film Award at this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival. A Távola da Rocha, directed by Samuel Barbosa, will also be screened from 7pm, for the first time at the 2021 Locarno International Film Festival.
Beautiful synthesis
Margarida Moz told HM that the aim of the film exhibition is to “synthesize the Portuguese films that have had the most attention in the international cinema”, presenting “a wide range of genres and themes”.
The link between these films is that they were “selected in very relevant film festivals, which gave them huge international visibility.”
“We missed a lot of other films, some that might have even won more awards, but above all, this exhibition points out different paths for Portuguese cinema and it is limited to five screenings, so it is important that this program reveals these different styles”, says the director of Come Out.
Margarida Moz adds: “We didn’t want to have an exhibition because, yes, we do want to bring our best assets and prove that ‘independent’ films are what they are because the market is very oriented towards big Hollywood productions, leaving little room for them to exhibit smaller films, but no less interesting”.
The official recalled that “Portuguese cinema has a strong link with Macau” and highlighted “in a less obvious way” the names of directors such as Ivo Ferreira, João Ruí Guerra da Mata and João Pedro Rodríguez, or even Leonor Neuvo and Jorge Yacom. For example, these directors “spent their childhood in Macau, which is indirectly reflected in their films”.
Therefore, he stressed that “bringing the best of Portuguese cinema to Macau means promoting our culture in a positive way in this region with which we share a great cultural affinity”. “We want to not only present this film to the local Portuguese community, which has always enthusiastically supported this exhibition, but also to build bridges with the wider local community, being exposed to Portuguese cinematography that inspires young filmmakers around the world”, concluded Margarida Moz.
The festival is part of the celebrations of Portugal, Camões and the Portuguese Community Day on June 10th. With Lusa
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