SUNDAY 19 DECEMBER 18h30 (GMT)
Free entrance (no need to register in advance). | Exclusive online access in the UK. Please register here.
CURATED BY MOTELX
Archive session followed by a Q&A with the director Raquel Freire.
ASHES (CINZAS)
Portugal, 2018, 15’
Director: Célia Fraga
In a rural setting in the 1940s, a young widow lives in a state of deep loneliness and misery. Her routine consists of a succession of identical days spent at home or working in the fields. But things take a turn for the worse when a mysterious entity starts to torment her.
Célia Fraga was born in Macedo de Cavaleiros, Bragança. She graduated in Language Science at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto in 2013. Her passion for cinema and writing led her to enrol on a Masters in Directing for Cinema and Television, in 2017, at the Artistic School of Porto. Cinzas is her first short film.
RENDING (RASGANÇO)
Portugal, França, 2001, 93’
Director: Raquel Freire
"Rending" takes place in the city of Coimbra and is set around university students and their academic rituals. A closed world, dominated by the Academic Association and its secular traditions of customs and codes of behaviour. One day, a young man arrives from abroad. He doesn’t belong and so that world remains closed to him. To avenge being rejected, he seduces and conquers several women for morbid and violent purposes. The “rasganço”, which gives the film its name, is the wildest tradition in Coimbra: on graduation day, friends tear students’ academic gowns with their teeth and nails and steal their cloaks, which they then have to recover. World premiere at the 2001 Venice Film Festival’s Critics Week.
Raquel Freire was born in Porto. She is a daughter of the April 1974 revolution, and also a filmmaker, writer, screenwriter, producer, citizen, and mother. She studied Law and History, Film Aesthetics and The History and Aesthetics of Portuguese Cinema at the University of Coimbra. The films “Rio Vermelho”, “Rending”, “Veneno Cura”, “SOS”, “Esta é a minha cara: criadores de teatro”, “L'Academie”, and “Dreamocracy” have premiered in competition at international film festivals such as Venice, Turin, São Paulo, Montreal, Gwanju, Leeds, Seoul, Clermont-Ferrand, Kenya, Vila do Conde, Porto, Sweden, among others; have been screened in theatres and on Portuguese and French television; and have sold out on DVD. She was distinguished at the Cannes Film Festival by the European Film Foundation as a young European producer. She debuted as a theatre director with the show NóSOUTRXS, which she created and performed at Teatro Municipal São Luiz. Her books TRANSIBERICLOVE and ULISSEIA were published in Portuguese in 2015 and 2016, and in German in 2017, at the Frankfurt International Book Fair. She is a visiting professor at several Portuguese and foreign universities in the fields of cinema, acting for the camera, directing, gender studies, art and political science. She was a guest artist at the ALICE/CES/Universidade Coimbra Project, and directed “Pela Mão de Alice”, a documentary about Boaventura de Sousa Santos that premiered at several festivals in 2018. She premiered the films “Happy Island”, with La Ribot, and “Dançando com a Diferença'' at the Geneva Festival of 2018. The film “Mulheres do Meu País” premiered in 2019, and she is currently preparing the documentaries “A Excepção Portuguesa” and “Feministas na Revolução”, and the short film “Não”. She won the CNC competition (Centre National du Cinéma Français) to fund the writing of the fiction feature Trans Iberic Love. She has recently finished her 3rd fiction feature film “Filme Sem Câmara”.