OLHARES IN 2022
PROGRAMME

SEVEN DAYS OF CINEMA, TWO VENUES
AND A JOURNEY TO LEBANON

What if we had a guest country at the Festival? What if we had more feature films, without taking space away from short films? What if we had more festival days and expanded to two venues? What if we invited a director who made the history of cinema? What if we gave voice to old and new rebellions?
We set out to organise the 9th edition of Olhares do Mediterrâneo – Women’s Film Festival with some of these questions and desires in mind. Some evolved from the films we received and became clearer as we moved through the process of programming. The result is seven days of cinema with 51 films to be screened at the Cinemateca Portuguesa and at Cinema São Jorge, with a focus on Lebanon, a country that reinvents itself over and over again, against the disasters of its past and present, a labyrinth of identities, conflicts, and hopes. Our special guest is Heiny Srour, the first Arab woman to have a film screened at Cannes, in 1974, and distributed worldwide. A documentary whose title, The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, is a declaration and a long-term project at the same time.
The Lebanon civil war is the point of departure of this edition of the Festival, and its port of arrival is an orchard in Tunisia, where the predicament of the young Arab generations is laid bare in the course of one day of labour among the fig trees, with beauty and restlessness in conversation. In between, an open sea of films and themes.
There’s a daughter who tries to kill her father, real and symbolic, and a daughter who has to come to terms with a past that has been buried to protect her. A young Italian doctor who specializes in war medicine in the Gaza Strip, and a Palestinian graffiti artist who paints his way to freedom on the Separation Wall. There are women who don’t comply with their alleged biological destiny, and a queer refugee who finds his dream at the top of a rocking crane. But there are also children who hide to reinvent the world, and kids who set out on adventures in the woods; teenage girls who steal a camera tripod in a park in Tehran, and young men who reveal their fragility in a barbershop in Marseille.
This is just a glimpse of the variety of characters and stories that will fill the screens of this year’s edition of Olhares do Mediterrâneo – Women’s Film Festival. And, once again, we will invite our audience of all ages to stay with us beyond movies, for debates, informal conversations with directors, creative workshops, a masterclass, a concert, and an indispensable tribute to the 3 Marias and the Novas Cartas Portuguesas, in the 50th anniversary of their publication.
Over the course of one week we will share with you visions of the world, experiences and ideas, with a programme that celebrates the talent of Mediterranean women filmmakers and hopefully trills hearts and shakes minds.

For more information on the films and the rest of the programming study our schedule HERE, the simplified programme HERE and the catalog HERE
ALL FILMS ARE SCREENED IN THEIR ORIGINAL VERSION
AND SUBTITLED  IN ENGLISH AND PORTUGUESE