09.23.2022

"It's party Time" by Léo Liotard, awarded at DocLisboa

Léo Liotard's film, produced by the AJC, received the "New Talent Award" at the 20th edition of the DocLisboa festival. Four Wallonia-Brussels productions or co-productions were also selected for this 2022 edition.

Doclisboa is one of the main film festivals in Portugal, and one of the most important documentary film events in Europe. Each year the festival presents a selection of the finest recent documentaries. For this 2022 edition, the programme includes two French-speaking Belgian productions and one co-production. Dominique Loreau's film Une si longue marche, produced by Cobra Films, has been selected for the international competition and will be presented as World Premiere.

This film explores the conflicting encounter between humans and Chinese crabs that were coincidentally imported to Northern Europe, and that pass through our polluted rivers every year. In their attempt to avoid the obstacles created by humans, they invade small towns or hide in filters of nuclear power plants. Who are they, how can we get to know them, assess them, live with them? In the western world, most children who discover the crabs are very interested and want to understand their world, while most adults consider them harmful and want to destroy them. For the Chinese they are a source of joy. They savor them during the mid-autumn festival and in honor of the full moon, they depict them in paintings and see them as symbols of success. Dominique Loreau envisions a poetic cinematographic essay that is open to the fragmentary, contradictory and polyphonic diversity of reality, which at the same time becomes a mirror of our society and an ode to life.

Dreaming Walls inside the Chelsea hotel directed by Amélie van Elmbt & Maya Duverdier was presented in the Heart Beat section. The film produced by Clin d'oeil films continues its successful career at the festival.

The Chelsea Hotel, a New York counterculture landmark for over a century, is being transformed into a luxury hotel. Amidst the chaos of the construction site, caught between a mythical past and an uncertain future, its last old residents try to reinvent themselves.

We will also find It's Party Time by Léo Liotard, which was presented as wolrd premiere in the International Competition.

I filmed my friends between 1995 and 2000, in France, with a Hi8 camcorder. We were in high school: we smoked firecrackers, we watched movies, we listened to music. We were sixteen, twenty, we were partying

Finally, we find Les Harkis co-produced by Les Films du Fleuve and directed by Philippe Faucon. The film, already presented at the Quinzaine des cinéastes in Cannes, was screened as part of a retrospective on the colonial question during DocLisboa.

During the Algerian War (1954-1962), many impoverished young Algerian men, known as “Harkis”, volunteered to join the French Army. Salah and Kaddour find themselves under the orders of Lieutenant Pascal. But as the conflict draws to an end, the prospect of independence looms. The outlook for Harkis seems bleak. Lieutenant Pascal confronts his superiors, insisting that every single man in his platoon must be evacuated to France.

The 2022's edition of the festival took place from 6 to 16 October in Lisbon.