In 2018 we celebrate the 5th edition of "Há Filmes Na Baixa!", the regular program of Porto/Post/Doc. Watch and re-watch films in Oporto's downtown is today a reality that we pretend to actualize continuously through monthly cinema cycles investing, as always, in other images, subexposed cinematographies that came out of the darkness to the screen of Passos Manuel. Gathering the exhibition of new productions and the History of cinema, the films will be programmed under a monthly subject.
The first cycle of the year, scheduled for the end of February, recalls two documentaries screened at Porto/Post/Doc: Meteors, by Gürcan Keltek, and Taste of Cement, by Ziad Kalthoum, both internationally multiawarded. War films, away from the conventions, in which the expressive sensitivity of the directors invites the spectator to emerge beyond the armed conflicts (Kurd-turkish and Syrian, respectively) as political and social events. Intimal and violent gazes-essays, but never pornographic.
Meteors was the winner of the Grand Prize by Vinhos Verdes and Taste of Cement won the award Biberstein Gusmão for the best emergent director. Besides these awards, both films have been conquering exhibitions and mentions in the european circuit of festivals, namely Locarno, IFRR - International Film Festival of Rotterdam and Visions du Reél. The sessions of HFNB! are an unique opportunity to watch or re-watch these two documentaries in a cinema room.
Cycle #01.2018 "O Regresso do Há Filmes Na Baixa!"
10:00 p.m., Cinema Passos Manuel
February 27 and 28
Taste of Cement, by Ziad Kalthoum
2017, DEU, LBN, ARE, QAT, 85', M12
Running away from war and poverty, some Syrian refugees find work in a now more peaceful Lebanon looking for labour to restructure its urban fabric. During the day, these men help raise a skyscraper in Beirut and, at night, prevented by the Lebanese government from circulating through the city, descend to the subsoil of the building still in skeleton, where they rehearse, between beams and pools of water, the possible domestic life that is denied them on both sides of the border. Although marked by a certain poetic bent, the film lends an almost physical dimension to the suffering of those men, forced, by the nature of their trade, to a daily confrontation with the memory of their destroyed houses. (Daniel Marques Pinto)
March 7 and 8
Meteors, by Gürcan Keltek
2017, NLD, TUR, 84', M12
At night everything materializes in a contrast: darkness and light. What is left for us to do when what we know is withdrawn? What do we become when people, places, and things become memories? The Kurdish-Turkish conflict is rekindled in late summer of 2015. Turkey held the largest military operation in the country's southeastern history. However, there was no media coverage or official reports on the operations, only the video and photographic records of the inhabitants of that region... and their memories. War is a metamorphosing agent of cities, landscape and feelings, confessed in the first person by the narrator. One night, a meteor shower stops the conflict. Cosmic, divine intervention? Nature follows its course, but cinema and words won't forget what happened. (Carolina Rufino)
