IndieLisboa 2025: highlights from the festival that sells a quarter of its tickets to kids

I’ve been an on-and-off attendee at IndieLisboa film festival for nigh on 20 years, and although personnel and programming structures have altered considerably during that time, other elements happily remain constant. There’s always reliably discerning curation of independently-minded recent cinema and an eye-opening retrospective dimension in collaboration with the Lisbon Cinemateca; plus a useful barometer of current Portuguese cinema, still one the most undervalued and under-released despite the prominence of Pedro Costa, Miguel Gomes and a few other notables.  

More on all those imminently, but I was particularly struck this time by the number of boisterous and excited kids knocking around the main festival sites. IndieLisboa has always taken cinema education seriously and put the accent on youth, but that tendency now seems ever more pronounced. An entire strand of the festival, Brand New, is dedicated to emerging voices in Portuguese cinema, all the way down to school level. Apparently a quarter of all festival ticket sales are to kids, which is surely evidence of a sound investment in the medium’s future.

But let’s start back in the past, since this year’s retrospective was undoubtedly my festival highlight, providing an opportunity to explore the entire career of Bulgarian director Binka Zhelyazkova from 1957 to 1988, consisting of six features, two documentaries and a TV series, shown on restored prints (three of these films screened at the Barbican in 2023).

It’s difficult to pick one to focus on as they were all at such an elevated level, but the early and profoundly moving We Were Young (1961) is by any standards a remarkable film. It’s a love story set among a Partisan resistance group in Nazi-occupied Bulgaria, in which Zhelyazkova clearly draws on her own experience in that milieu, such is the level of absorbing detail and powerful compassion for the plight of her beautifully drawn young characters. This was only the second full retrospective outside Zhelyazkova’s native Bulgaria, but that will surely change over the coming years as word spreads.

There was one other extraordinary work from the past, also directed by a woman and also featuring resistance, albeit in a different form. The Sealed Soil (1977) by Marva Nabili is set in a pre-revolutionary Iranian village where an unnamed young woman (Flora Shabaviz) silently refuses various suitors, upending the deeply conservative traditions on which this world is founded. Comparisons have been made to Robert Bresson and Chantal Akerman and the film certainly holds its own in that exalted company – equally rigorous and austere, equally disinclined to explain a protagonist’s actions by way of pat psychology.

Víctor Diago’s debut feature Downriver a Tiger focuses on another young woman in a moment of crisis. Julia (Júlia Diago) is Catalan but escaping her past and her family in Glasgow, where a fleeting relationship with Shubham (Shubham Kirve) before he returns home to India, plus a problem with her eyes, weigh heavily on her. At the same time she’s photographing Glaswegian locals on bridges for some vague project, allowing for an element of documentary city portraiture in the mix which is then deepened through some surprising and evocative archive film of Glasgow social history. 

I loved Diago’s cavalier yet purposeful way with structure, and the metaphorical business to do with bridges, sight and seeing, and a stalking tiger adds richness, even if it’s too on the nose at times. It’s a film quick with ideas and jagged emotions, idiosyncratic and alive in so many ways.

There were several Portuguese films to commend in the national section, but the two standouts both came from the same Lisbon-based production company, O Som e a Fúria. Denise Fernandes’ serene debut feature, Hanami, is set on Fogo in Cabo Verde, a remote volcanic island where the young child protagonist Nana has been left in the care of her grandmother following the death of her father and the departure of her traumatised mother, like so many others from the island, to Portugal in search of work. 

We see Nana nurtured into adolescence by a lovingly portrayed community that helps her overcome the melancholy she feels at being abandoned, until the moment arrives where she too will face a decision to stay or leave. All this is conveyed with gentle rhythms, acute empathy and perfectly judged elements of magical realism, creating something quite special that thoroughly deserved the main prize for best Portuguese film.

I’ve been a devotee of Sandro Aguilar’s work ever since his atmospheric first feature, A zona, was screened at the London Film Festival back in 2008. His third feature First Person Plural doesn’t disappoint; it’s another deeply strange, singular object that shows Aguilar spreading his wings and moving in new directions. 

The setting is a gorgeously realised bourgeois family home where the parents, about to embark on a trip to the tropics, experience bizarre behavioural tics and symptoms after taking their vaccines. There’s some brilliantly off-key acting and an almost liquid flow to the images; slowly but surely the viewer is sucked into this altered, hallucinatory state of being. The film is completely sui generis, and you could go mad trying to figure out exactly what’s going on; better perhaps to just sit back and enjoy the woozy upholstered ride.

Last but not least, a British director was given the full retrospective treatment at the festival – film essayist Charlie Shackleton is in his early thirties but has already amassed a substantial body of work. TV commission Fear Itself uses film clips with voiceover to lay bare the scare mechanisms of horror. The selected films are wide-ranging and the narration insightful, with a strong personal investment; but it’s the skill with which Shackleton manages to elude being simply illustrative in the manner of typical TV clip-docs that impresses.

The work that really got me though was Paint Drying, a witty, crowdfunded protest film consisting of a 607-minute static shot of – you guessed it – paint drying! The impulse behind it is a pointed dig at the exorbitant fees charged by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) – ruinous for the UK independent film sector – by forcing that organisation’s executives to sit through the whole thing in order to assign a classification. It’s a smart institutional critique and intervention that opens a path to more of the same by low-budget filmmakers inclined to attempt disruption of an unnecessarily exploitative system. Frozen Chicken Defrosting? Or maybe A Sapling Becomes a Tree, a hundred-year durational epic?

Paint Drying has yet to be given an airing (surely the appropriate word for this piece) in the UK, but hopefully some enterprising curator will make it happen soon – perhaps on an outdoor screen in Soho Square next to the BBFC offices?

IndieLisboa 2025 ran from 1 to 11 May.