New Voices, Bold Visions

The 2019 edition was compact but fearless, six films chosen to show just how adventurous contemporary Portuguese cinema had become. What the programme lacked in size it made up for in range, moving from the surreal to the starkly political over a handful of November evenings. It was also the first edition held at the Moviemento Kino in Kreuzberg, the home the festival has kept ever since.

Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt's Diamantino, a deliriously inventive fairy tale that won the Grand Prize at Cannes' Critics' Week, sat at one extreme. Sérgio Tréfaut's bleak Alentejo drama Raiva sat at the other. Susana de Sousa Dias' Luz Obscura continued her essential work on the memory of dictatorship and repression.

Among the guests, António Pinhão Botelho was present to introduce his film Ruth.

Small as it was, the edition confirmed the festival's ambition: to bring films that rarely travel, and the filmmakers who make them, to a Berlin audience hungry for auteur cinema with a distinct identity.