“Nação Valente”, by Carlos Conceição, and “O Sangue”, by Pedro Costa, are two of the Portuguese films that will be at the Melbourne Film Festival, which starts on Thursday in Australia.
The festival is celebrating its 71st edition, with a selection of films across geographies and themes, with some Portuguese productions included in the program.
In the program dedicated to Africa and the Middle East is “Nação Valente”, by Carlos Conceição, a film that “invokes the ghosts of Angola’s colonial past” and which has already been awarded at the Locarno Film Festival.
In the section dedicated to Latin American cinema is “A Flor de Buriti”, by Brazilian director Renée Nader Messora and Portuguese João Salaviza, distinguished this year at Cannes.
“A Flor do Buriti” was shot with the Krahô people of Brazil, in the indigenous land of Kraholândia, where the two directors had already made “Chuva é Cantoria na Aldeia dos Mortos”.
The film “Flor de Buriti” is joined by “Eureka”, by Argentine Lisandro Alonso in an intercontinental partnership with Mexico, France, Germany and Portugal, by Rosa Filmes, and described by the festival as a “triptych of reflections on colonialism past and present”,
The Australian festival will also screen Pedro Costa’s first feature film, “O sangue” (1990), in a restored copy, and the film “As filhas do Fogo”, in a session of short films dedicated to “masters” of cinema, alongside Lucrecia Martel, Jean-Luc Godard, Pedro Almodóvar and Tsai Ming-liang.
“Surfacing”, by Italian director and researcher Rossella Schillaci, co-produced with Portugal, is in the section dedicated to immersive reality and virtual reality and focuses on the reality of women with children serving sentences in Italian prisons.
The Melbourne Film Festival runs through most of August with screenings in cinemas and online.