The 23rd edition of Doclisboa will take place from October 16 to 26 and has already revealed its opening and closing films, along with some of the main highlights of its program. The festival will open with With Hasan in Gaza, by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, an urgent tribute to the resistance in Gaza. The work, edited from footage shot in 2001 during the search for Abdel Rahim —a fellow prisoner of Aljafari in 1989— unfolds as a road movie that portrays the everyday life of a people marked by the violence of occupation. The film stands as an act of reclaiming the vitality of images of Gaza, as a counterpoint and memory in the face of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel.

The closing film will be The Tree of Knowledge, by Eugène Green, who returns to Lisbon after works such as The Portuguese Nun (2009) and Lisbon Revisited (2019). In this new Portuguese-French co-production, starring Diogo Dória, Leonor Silveira, João Arrais, Ana Moreira, and Rui Pedro Silva, the director builds a fable about a teenager, an ogre, and a dark pact, in a barely veiled critique of the city’s surrender to tourism.

Within the From the Earth to the Moon section, dedicated to works that allow us to see the worlds of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the world premiere of I Only Rest in the Storm – versão integral, by Pedro Pinho, stands out. This extended version of the Cannes-awarded film earned Cleo Diára the Best Actress prize in the Un Certain Regard section. The same section will feature Remake, by American filmmaker Ross McElwee, who returns after 14 years of absence with a work that combines personal reflection and a tribute to his son Adrian, who passed away in 2016. Also screening will be Bulakna, by Leonor Noivo, recent winner of the Renaud Victor Award at FIDMarseille, which addresses social inequalities in a postcolonial world while reflecting on the value of work, the body, and life.

In the Heartbeat section, Memórias do Teatro da Cornucópia, by Solveig Nordlund, revisits archival footage of the emblematic company founded in 1973 by Luis Miguel Cintra and Jorge Silva Melo, while Bull’s Heart, by Greek director Eva Stefani, follows the creation of Transverse Orientation by choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou and its European tour.

The complete program will be announced at a press conference on September 25 at Culturgest. In October, Lisbon will once again become a world epicenter of documentary cinema, confirming that, for ten days, “the whole world fits in Lisbon.”