49th IndieLisboa- Lisbon Festival of Independent Film

“Perhaps the youngest international film festival in the world, IndieLisboa has already developed a distinctive personality which attracts large and enthusiastic young audiences” writes Ronald Bergan about his first visit to IndieLisboa, the the young festival of independent cinema. And our Lisbon-based colleage José Vieira Mendes remarks that the “selection of Portuguese cinema — including the retrospective and the short films, but mainly four feature films — represents a view of a new generation of filmmakers (in their 40’s) of our country and its development as a member of the European Union: the culture, music, Euro Football Cup 2004 and its consequences for the people, the recent history before the Revolution of April 1974, the landscape more and more destroyed by urban pressure, and finally the country’s inertness immersed in a deep economic crisis and in a collective depression.”

The Critics’ Prize went to film Grain in Ear by Zhang Lu (a Chinese-South Korean coproduction).