The 2023 edition brought together twenty-seven films that blurred the line between fiction and the real. It was a year of remarkable range, from festival prizewinners to intimate shorts, screened across the autumn at the Moviemento in Kreuzberg.
At its centre stood João Canijo's diptych Bad Living and Living Bad, which won the Silver Bear Jury Prize in Berlin, and Cláudia Varejão's tender coming-of-age drama Wolf and Dog, which she came to present in person. Documentary ran strong too, Ana Sofia Fonseca's portrait of Cesária Évora filled the room with the voice of the Barefoot Diva.
Portuguese animation had a landmark year, crowned by João Gonzalez's Ice Merchants, the first Portuguese film ever nominated for an Academy Award in the category. Nuno Beato presented his animated feature My Grandfather's Demons and brought along one of its stop-motion puppets to show the children in the audience. A whole evening of shorts celebrated a generation of animators working at the edge of the form.
Other filmmakers travelled to introduce their work in person: Marco Martins with Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures, Ansgar Schäfer with the documentary Journey to the Sun, Luísa Homem with Suzanne Daveau, and Mónica Martins Nunes with her short Sortes.
Three sessions reached beyond the regular programme. For European Arthouse Cinema Day, João Canijo's Bad Living and Living Bad screened together at the cinema filmkunst66, with the director there in person.
A special animation session brought the filmmaker Pedro Serrazina to talk the audience through the craft up close.
Serrazina also led a session at a Berlin university, carrying the festival's animation focus into the classroom.
The conversations that followed each screening, with directors, actors and crew, turned the programme into something closer to a gathering than a festival: rigorous in its curation, warm in its welcome, and unmistakably Portuguese.
.webp)
