Independent Heroes: Paul Verhoeven and Vincent Macaigne
IndieLisboa 2016 is born out of the usual balance between the return of several filmmakers the festival has accompanied and the introduction of a vast set of newcomers – mainly in the International Competition – that we are sure will return in the next years.
Not by accident, Whit Stillman and Mia Hansen-Løve will open and close, respectively, this year’s festival with the presentation of their most recent works in a kind of afterword to the retrospectives we dedicated to them in 2015 and in a changeover to the Independent Heroes of 2016: Paul Verhoeven and Vincent Macaigne.
Among the many highlights of this year’s programme, the complete retrospective of Paul Verhoeven’s film work – the first ever held in Portugal and only made possible due to the collaboration with Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema – might be the event attracting most attention from the media, given the notoriety of the Dutch filmmaker, whose American career in the 1980s and 1990s made him become known worldwide. The cult around films like Turks fruit, RoboCop and Showgirls is still alive and has continued to grow with every new generation of cinephiles. This is a work that will open a new chapter immediately after IndieLisboa with the presentation of Verhoeven’s latest film – Elle, the long-awaited encounter with Isabelle Huppert – at the Cannes festival.
Also awaited this year in Cannes is another of our Independent Heroes this year, as one or two films in which he stars will probably have its premiere there. Before Cannes, Vincent Macaigne is coming to Lisbon to show us why he was considered the best successor of Gérard Dépardieu on the French stages and screens (besides being a film actor and filmmaker, Macaigne is simultaneously omnipresent in the theatre as an actor and stage director). The Macaigne “hurricane” (almost thirty films as an actor, two films directed and countless participations in the theatre, all of this in the last half a dozen years) is the favourite of a whole new generation of French filmmakers who found in him the personification of a clumsy, contradictory and moving Romanticism (more than Dépardieu, Jean-Pierre Léaud is one of his possible predecessors).
The special focus of the Silvestre section is dedicated to the cinema of Jean-Gabriel Périot. Politics and intimacy intermingle in a unique way in the work of this French filmmaker, by means of a rigorous visual archaeology with a strong experimental side to it. We’ll be able to watch the nearly thirty short films he directed until now and his monumental first feature, Une jeunesse allemande. The second special programme revisits the vital training role played by the main institution teaching film in France, La Fémis (former IDHEC). In a view that spans across six decades we discover the first steps of people like Louis Malle, Johan van der Keuken, Claire Denis or François Ozon.
2016 couldn’t have had a better start for Portuguese cinema, which had a very strong presence at the Berlin Festival, culminating with the Golden Bear awarded to Balada de um Batráquio by Leonor Teles. IndieLisboa wants to prolong the luck star of our cinema and once again includes in its national programme one of its main bets. This year’s festival comprises 40 Portuguese films in total, most of which will have their world premiere here.
All you need to know at www.indielisboa.com
