According to LoveComing of age does not happen overnight: IndieLisboa turns 23 Susana Bessa July 2026 Festival Reports Issue 118 First feral, then domestic, at last foreign. – Raquel Nobre Guerra Growing up happens over time and never stops. At least, that’s what most of us want to believe. It’s a curious thing to think of film festivals as these ever-changing, ever-expanding entities with bodies that may one day stop responding to what’s happening to them. Every time I think about a film festival – about how it began as an edifice for communal sharing and eventually morphed into a place where cinema is bought and sold like any other commodity – I think about Jemma Desai’s suggestion that a festival is “about urgencies and about speed”.1 IndieLisboa makes for a perfect case study, not only because it is a generalist multi-genre festival – a monster with too many tentacles that seldom converse with each other – but also because it resists definition by claiming to serve as an ‘alternative’ to more commercially-minded cinema. Its programming says more about the personal taste of its organisers rather than it articulates any clear and coherent curatorial concepts that would drive diverse audiences to the theatres. Which was just what the cultural association Zero em Comportamento had in mind when, after a stint of time programming for university students at Cine Estúdio 222, an arthouse cinema in Lisbon that has since been left fading into obscurity, it launched the festival in 2004. IndieLisboa 2004 How can one identify a festival that resists its own categorisation with such a loosely fitted mosaic of pieces that make up a slice of “contemporary cinema”? In an interview with Público on the eve of the inaugural edition,2 IndieLisboa co-founder Nuno Sena introduced the event as “a display of the best we’ve yet to watch here.” That first year, the organisers wanted to programme Abbas Kiarostami, Johnnie To, João Canijo, as well the American documentary behind Morgan Spurlock’s phenomenon, Super Size Me (2004). Can you really put all of this in the same basket and call it “independent”? The edition’s ode to Sundance (whose artistic director at the time, John Cooper, was invited) seemed to suggest as much. When I first attended the festival in 2016 I travelled from London, where I was based at the time, and remember feeling confused by its sprawling structure. The films I came across there were exactly the kind I was watching at bigger festivals abroad, and hardly ever screened in this little European country perched on the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula. IndieLisboa wasn’t just reaching but activating new audiences, too. Back then, every edition included a retrospective. In 2016, the festival’s “Independent Hero” was Paul Verhoeven; in 2017, Jem Cohen and Paul Vecchiali. Long before their careers took off, some of these filmmakers were “discovered” by IndieLisboa, a long and illustrious list that includes the Safdie brothers, Angela Schanelec, Miguel Gomes, Valeska Grisebach, Eduardo Williams, J. P. Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta, Milagros Mumenthaler, Matías Piñeiro, Alex Ross Perry, Susana de Sousa Dias, Damien Manivel, and Raoul Peck. The festival had momentum, in no small part thanks to the influence of a young film programmer who would soon become one of its directors, Mafalda Melo. Under her tenure, IndieLisboa no longer seemed to recoil from the outside world, but embraced a more political stance to engage with those global crises. Since then, the festival has lost its founders, the “Independent Hero” has been replaced by a retrospective programme curated in partnership with the Portuguese Cinemateca, and the “indie” approach has all but waned. With the team changing in 2023, the festival has forsaken its original mandate – to showcase daring and idiosyncratic works that would hardly ever screen in the country – to swallow instead all sorts of genres and titles. In its search for a bigger audience, IndieLisboa shrank by expanding, sacrificing its indie ethos to become something far more diluted and toothless. By now, IndieLisboa is generally regarded among industry connoisseurs as a festival going through a crisis of confidence, and one of its own making. Everything Else Is Noise In 2026, the fest still operates under the post-COVID mantra of wanting to lure every insect back into the light. The beginning sequence of Nicolás Pereda’s brilliant Lo Demás Es Ruido (Everything Else Is Noise, 2026) offers a good visual analogy. Rows of cars are trying to flow through a four-way intersection: there’s arthouse cinema and its auteurs, genre cinema in all its different drawers (music, horror, children’s cinema), and the freedom of non-linear works à la Holy Destructors (2025). Whereas the festival we once knew was interested in advocating for low-budget imagined spaces of belonging – opening up conversations about the need to conquer a place on the sidelines in lieu of accepting typified formats – its main drive is now expansion. From immersive spectral studies (like Luis Macías’s 480-minute installation It’s Not the Sun Who Is Moving) to film screenings in the city’s public swimming pool and the inclusion of TV shows on the programme, IndieLisboa is stretching outward into uncharted terrain. This year’s edition, the best since 2023, rolled out a bite-sized programme curiously filled with debut feature films with short running times (70-90 mins). But the festival still lacked a coherent structure to house some of its most magnificent works – among them, Le Cri des Garde (The Fence, 2025), Meine Frau weint (My Wife Cries, 2026), Hmeli Potoli, (Dry Leaf, 2025), El desconcierto de Chile (The Bewilderment of Chile, 2025), Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen (Phantoms of July, 2025). Such is the dilemma IndieLisboa is confronting. Is enlarging an event so out of shape already into a more interdisciplinary realm the best way to cut through the festival’s platitudes? Shouldn’t its many sections finally learn how to speak to each other instead? Audiovisual sculptures at the end of the world IndieLisboa hadn’t even begun when I sat for a video interview with the precocious Leonardo Pirondi, whose attempts to “archive natural forms of the world through photogrammetry” gave birth to Fractais Tropicais (Tropical Fractals, 2026). Pirondi’s first feature is his fourteenth or fifteenth film overall – he’s unsure – and went on to premiere in the festival’s national competition. “The films deal with this contemporaneity that frightens me, or at least that’s where the ideas for them come from,” he told me from LA. “With a feature film, that happens in a more straightforward way. Short films are good drafts.” Pirondi is only 27 and has long been an experimenter; his images conjure a future akin to that dreamed up by Ben Rivers and Isadora Neves Marques. Like Pirondi’s, their images thrive off the intertwining of the real and the artificial, and their oeuvres are made up of “humming” films inspired by the sci-fi genre. These works exist in the realm of non-linear ambiguity, perched somewhere between documentary, fiction, and ethnography. And they all reveal dystopian, post-apocalyptic futures which, for all their devastation, nonetheless radiate a certain happiness. What Tropical Fractals can assert, with more strength, is an imagetic diagram for that same future, which beautifully dovetails with IndieLisboa’s desire to introduce all forms of visual artistry in order to nurture a healthy relationship with cinema as a spectrum. Similarly to Mare’s Nest (2026) – whose director, Ben Rivers, served as Pirondi’s mentor on this film – Tropical Fractals opens on what looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape. A solitary man roams empty, scorching streets, but the film is not about him. Backpack in tow, he collects things along the way, seemingly animated by the same need that drives scientists to write down the history of humanity on Earth from inside their labs. The film is concerned about what humans once were to each other, and why this particular man has chosen to abandon civilisation and renew his relationship with a dying planet’s natural elements. Tropical Fractals Like Rivers, the intent is not to read what is being communicated but to feel it, transition after transition, cutting back and forth from the explorer to the scientists. But whereas Mare’s Nest unfurls as a post-civilisation road movie, Tropical Fractals suggests instead a kind of sci-fi essayism, often tonally ambiguous, at times very bitter. Still, it’s not common to come across an end-of-the-world film this hopeful. With the help of the syllabic Brazilian Portuguese, Tropical Fractals makes that sereneness a source of energy. At one point during our conversation, Pirondi questioned the correct way to archive the world. “Cinema has become my way of dealing with things and, given [our] socio-political context, this is the time to think about different ways to build a world, about what other futures we might imagine”. That’s just what he does in Tropical Fractals. Pirondi is not a pessimist, but someone open to rebuilding “ways of seeing the same places, same landscapes” and “going back to them again”. That’s also why he always shoots on film. It’s a discovery process in and of itself, “this malleability,” he smiled. “It’s almost like a sculpture I do myself.” Like his wandering man, Pirondi decides to participate in the world. He doesn’t look upon it from a distance, but dives right into it. It’s powerful when something so visually phantasmagorical reverberates so strongly. Presented in the festival’s newly created Rizoma section, Júlio Alves’s film Não Desviar o Olhar (Don’t Look Away, 2026) similarly conjured an enchanting reverie. Full disclosure: back in January 2025, I was asked to visit the film’s set a few times (at ANIM, the National Archive of Moving Images), where I closely watched different set-ups and actors, took photographs and notes, and interviewed the cast and crew. Drawing from numerous and disparate elements, I concocted a hybrid reportage-essay radiographing all I witnessed. The piece came out just before the film’s world premiere at IndieLisboa. Fifteen months had passed since my visits to the shoot, and I still hadn’t seen the film. Yet I had imagined it all. Not unlike Pirondi’s, Alves’s film is about an artist’s reconciliation with the world. “What matters is less the end result and more the manufactured quality of the present moment, achieved collectively,” I had jotted down on set. “From that friction, comes the fire”. And by fire, I meant contagion. Don’t Look Away From the crackling of the celluloid as it passes through the steenbeck to the inclusion of a filmmaker who never announces himself as such (the enigmatic Manuel Mozos, clad in a blue lab coat), Don’t Look Away achieves a dreamlike spectacle. At its centre, four Portuguese film critics (Inês N. Lourenço, Luís Miguel Oliveira, Ricardo Vieira Lisboa, and Vasco Câmara) talk about their formative cinephilic memories as images of the films they recall run through their eyes in real time, projected around, behind, and often over their bodies. Alves uses white sheets and attaches chunks of glass in front of the lens so that his meta-linguistic essay reflects the various projections, with many points of entry, expected of a film inside a film. Like Pirondi, Alves is also haunted by the archive: how many films fit, occupy, and are contained by the body. He creates a cavernous mise-en-scène, projecting moving images on the walls so that various layers of light find themselves sandwiched atop each other, visualising how memory is implanted in a cinephile – someone receptive to such images. For that alone, Don’t Look Away is an indispensable exercise that recreates what goes on in a dark room when cinema enters, runs through, and eventually settles inside our body. Memory, Love and Labour: an investigation When there isn’t an archive, the aim is to assemble one. Headlining IndieLisboa’s international competition, Sophy Romvari’s first feature Blue Heron (2025) investigates the act of processing memory – a topic that’s been explored by other Canadian filmmakers like Sarah Polley and Sofia Bohdanowicz. Set in 1990s Vancouver Island, the film follows eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) as she moves with her Hungarian immigrant family into a new suburban home all while wrestling with the tantrums of her oldest half-brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes). Hazy and sharp at the same time, almost as if it was trying to emulate the retrieval of a long-lost dream, Blue Heron witnesses Romvari giving herself over to the body of a fictional character, an avatar of sorts, in order to situate her childhood trauma. In the film’s cold embrace, the frustrations surrounding memory’s incompleteness are illuminated, prepping the ground for a better understanding of our identity-seeking journeys, our stories of belonging. Blue Heron The goal here is not to use cinema to open up the past; most of the time, to restore a past event is to alter it. Instead, Romvari summons the medium to look toward the future. Blue Heron is very much a formalistic object of refracting light and fractured clarity, where the concept of time and truth don’t exist as a measurable metric. As children, we’re not aware of what’s happening around us, exactly. Sasha takes in the feeling of emotional unrest, but what to make of it? How to understand what really happened or is happening? The film reproduces that same feeling. It’s only when layers are unveiled that we realise the sheer brilliance of what Romvari is doing. Rodrigo Braz Teixeira’s episodic debut feature film Segundo Amor (According to Love, 2026), unveiled in the national competition, follows in those same footsteps. The film tracks a young couple’s love story and their group of friends. Of all the festival premieres this year, According to Love was the only one that wasn’t the least bit concerned with providing its audience contextual knowledge about the people on screen. It starts in media res, with a couple lying next to each other on a beach. It’s summer; everything fleeting and long-lasting at once. Soft in its telling, According to Love does not need to sew itself together. It simply reveals itself to us, as if through clouds of story. An antidote to Portuguese cinema’s rigid eruditeness, According to Love is assured throughout, never afraid of its vulnerable mumblecore bite. Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love This same investigation is brought to light as an aesthetic experience by Jodie Mack’s short Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love (2025), which screened in the Silvestre sidebar. Recorded over the span of four years in one garden, Mack archives the life cycle of her botanical animation. On screen, flower petals float on water. From one moment to the other, they’re back together, blooming and twirling, one by one. They either stand upright or upside down. Suddenly, they’re part of bouquets, interspersed by other floral prints found in the domestic world. Before us, a feast of colour. Jodie Mack’s gaze is intense, productive, obsessive. From the individual to the collective, the generalised beauty to the detailed learned vernacular, these beautiful objects are forced to be together by superimposition with patterns, to live with each other in a stroboscopic sequence, until withering away and being dipped in water. Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love captures their transition from inert material to something seemingly conscious. All the while, it brings forth the productive labour (the dance and inevitable transformation) that defines the connection between living beings beyond logic, reason or experience. Another marvellous example of a film that labours is Valérie Donzelli’s À Pied D’Ouevre (At Work, 2025). Based on Franck Courtès’s autobiographical novel of the same name, At Work centres on a once successful photographer who succumbs to poverty and ekes out a living through menial jobs that guarantee him just enough free time to write his next book. When his father asks him his intentions in carrying on living with such difficulty, given he’s already a published writer, the man seems undeterred. Writing is something one must do; there’s no stopping him. As soft as it is searing, At Work orbits an existential dilemma: whether to choose a creative if financially precarious life, or give away time to an unrecognisable, more plastic existence. Donzelli intersperses the at times bland voiceover with interwoven super 8 and super 16 sequences in order to better connect with her protagonist, while the film opens a very urgent precedent to talk about the lack of economic value tied to the production of an intellectual life. At Work is a quiet character study with a very straightforward, linear narrative, yet it unfurls as a fable of sorts. It definitely ignites naiveté like one. It proclaims control over one’s own life as the one invaluable thing. Rose of Nevada Which leads us to Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada (2025), where the labour is menial, psychological, and nightmarish. The film is named after a fishing boat that mysteriously shows up at the harbour of an unnamed Cornish town some thirty years after being lost at sea with all hands. A young, cash-strapped man agrees to join the new crew, only to get stuck in a time loop which he desperately tries to escape to return to his wife and child. There is a leaky roof that cracks a house open, a red hat from the past, and another man on the boat who chooses to accept his new reality instead of giving into despair. Jenkin is a filmmaker IndieLisboa has programmed since his 2019 Bait. By now, the audience knows him and his artisanal, muscular cinema well. They know he shoots with a hand-cranked bolex 16mm clockwork camera, that he manually processes the film, that there is no synchronised sound, that his are structures for the hyperreal to become hypertextual. As these men lug fish around, night after night, even in the middle of a high storm, a fever takes over. This is a war film, whose relentless geometrical vocabulary and montage oozes nostalgia for the past and its sense of unbreakable fate, the murkiest of waters. “There’s no time” echoes from the mouth of the man who finally encounters his family at last, for a second, and can’t stay. Jenkin could easily join efforts with Pirondi. While the former ruminates on a Britain that needs to take stock of the past, the latter interrogates our place in the world. Together, they talk about a film festival in Portugal that needs to head back to the writing board, to the more radical, less flashy spaces whence to question and look for the now. It takes time for a body to fit a growing skin. Sometimes it’s enough to programme the films that will allow for that. All of these subdued but rugged works do. IndieLisboa 30 April – 10 May 2026 https://indielisboa.com/en/ Endnotes https://www.sentientartfilm.com/post/notes-from-the-field-jemma-desai ↩ Público Newspaper: https://www.publico.pt/2004/08/06/culturaipsilon/noticia/indielisboa-um-festival-do-melhor-cinema-que-nunca-se-viu-ca-1200625 ↩
