The Festivals announce some highlights of their programmes, namely the Opening and Closing Films in Lisbon, and the Opening Film in Porto, in addition to the Special Screenings in Lisbon and a special addition to the Panorama section in Lisbon:

 

QUEER PORTO: OPENING NIGHT

Premiered last February at the Berlinale, in the new Perspectives section, Queer Porto opens with Two Times João Liberada, by Paula Tomás Marques. Cinema within cinema, the film follows João, an actress from Lisbon, who stars in a historical biographical film about Liberada, a young gender dissident persecuted by the Inquisition. In her debut feature, Paula Tomás Marques revisits her premise of rewriting history through a queer lens and doing justice to its subjects, going back to past times, namely reinterpreting and reappropriating gender dissident figures persecuted or trialled during the Inquisition, as she had already done in her short films When We Dead Awaken (2022) and Dildotectonics (2023). Made with almost no financial support, this is also a film imbued with a strong sense of community, bringing together a group of trans artists and performers, such as June João (also co-screenwriter), André Tecedeiro, Jenny Larrue, Alice Azevedo, Caio Amado, Eloísa d'Ascensão and Tiago Aires Lêdo, who offer a powerful dimension of identity and autofiction to a film that is already a milestone in Portuguese cinema.

 

QUEER LISBOA: OPENING NIGHT

Straight from Sundance, the honour of opening film at Queer Lisboa goes to Plainclothes, the auspicious debut feature by North American director Carmen Emmi. The action takes place in the 1990s, in quiet Syracuse in upstate New York. Lucas (played by Tom Blyth) is a young police officer whose daily mission involves ambushing male homosexuals in the toilets of a shopping mall, where he meets Andrew (Russell Tovey), with whom he falls in love. Plainclothes in an elegantly written narrative, a love story with a strong social matrix, set in a decade shaken by HIV/AIDS. To this empathetic story, Emmi adds an aesthetic density, invoking the days of camcorders and VHS, which densify the bodies of Blyth and Tovey – both masterful in their roles – while also citing those now historic images from the 1950s of the Mansfield ambushes in Ohio (recovered by filmmaker William E. Jones), resulting in a film steeped in nostalgia and rare cohesion, which nevertheless dares to experiment.

 

QUEER LISBOA: CLOSING NIGHT

This year's Queer Lisboa closing night hosts the screening of an impressive and moving documentary, Between Goodbyes, by Jota Mun. In the mid-1950s, South Korea implemented an international adoption programme to integrate its war orphans. Decades later, the country's population control propaganda claims that ‘two is too many’ and pressures poor families to give up their children, especially if they have daughters. Mieke would be the fourth girl in the family. She grew up in the Netherlands, lost her adoptive parents at an early age, was able to recognise herself as queer and marry another woman. The efforts of her South Korean birth family allow for a rapprochement that will be marked by doubts, emotional outbursts, and the slow mitigation of guilt. Jota Mun, who was also themself given away for adoption as a baby, directs this sensitive and profoundly researched documentary, which is also a means of communication between family members. Surgical and responsible, the film chronicles the possibility of reconciliation, without forgetting to denounce adoption practices that have degenerated into a business, with the West clearing its conscience and South Korea enriching the state's money vaults.

 

QUEER LISBOA: SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Having achieved fame at a very young age in France for his performance in André Techiné's Wild Reeds (1994), Gaël Morel began directing almost simultaneously, with queer themes being a constant presence in his work. Premiered in 2024 at Cannes, Morel is back to directing fiction with To Live, to Die, to Live Again, a delicate and complex exploration of HIV/AIDS. What happens when you prepare your death and learn that you still have a life – perhaps even a long one – ahead of you? It is in 1990s Paris that the throuple composed of Emma, Sammy and Cyril, all HIV-positive, live through the most complicated years of the epidemic and then the arrival of the triple therapy, which gives them hope for life. Between the survival of some and the death of those who did not reach that pivotal year of 1996, Morel constructs a narrative with a strong metaphysical bent, about what life becomes after a death sentence. This special screening is dedicated to the dear memory of Pedro Silvério Marques, a renowned Portuguese HIV activist who passed away last March.
 

Also screened as a special screening is Death and Life Madalena (pictured above), by Guto Parente, a Brazilian co-production with Portugal's C.R.I.M, which premiered at the latest edition of FID Marseille. The film follows the footsteps of its protagonist, a film producer, eight months pregnant, and about to shoot a low-budget science fiction film, written by her recently deceased father. When Davi, the film's director and her ex-husband, mysteriously disappears from the set, Madalena must do everything she can to finish the film before the baby is born. Under this premise, Guto Parente pays homage to precarious, artisanal cinema, made among friends, far from the formulas of the industry; a type of cinema with a special charm, but difficult to carry out. Sprinkled with that typically Brazilian humour that is a weapon of survival, the chosen device is comedy, with a fabulous performance by actress Noá Bonoba. An oeuvre that is also a celebration of an artistic community on the margins of society, of its resilience and commitment. Parente returns to the festival to introduce his film.

 

QUEER LISBOA: PANORAMA

Straight from the latest edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the festival adds Harry Lighton's British feature Pillion to its Panorama section. A psychodrama with clever touches of humour, the film is a risky dive into the gay world of fetishism and BDSM, focusing mainly on the dynamics between master and slave, seeking to understand whether love is possible within this strict hierarchy made up of imbalances between the parties. It is not easy to explore this somewhat secret universe without falling into stereotypes, but Lighton succeeds in doing so. The secret lies not so much in the dialogue, but in the silences and nuances of the magnificent performances by Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård. Colin (Melling) sings in an a cappella group in a pub, where he meets Ray (Skarsgård), an enigmatic biker. To be with Ray, Colin has to learn submission and to love within that dynamic. It is here that the film skilfully structures Colin between the familiar context of his parents and that of a community of submissives, his peers. Faced with the almost always unbreakable Ray, it is Colin who transforms and teaches us that submission can be a place of power.

 

New titles announced:

 

OPENING NIGHT / QUEER LISBOA 29

Plainclothes, Carmen Emmi (USA, 2025, 95’)

 

CLOSING NIGHT / QUEER LISBOA 29

Between Goodbyes, Jota Mun (USA, South Korea, 2024, 96’)

 

SPECIAL SCREENINGS / QUEER LISBOA 29

Death and Life Madalena, Guto Parente (Brazil, Portugal, 2025, 85’)
To Live, to Die, to Live Again, Gaël Morel (France, 2024, 109’)

 

PANORAMA / QUEER LISBOA 29

Pillion, Harry Lighton (UK, 2025, 106’)

 

OPENING NIGHT / QUEER PORTO 11

Two Times João Liberada, Paula Tomás Marques (Portugal, 2025, 70’)