My first time at IndieLisboa coincided with their anniversary edition and my excitement to discover this slightly under the radar film festival couldn’t be greater. And my excitement only grew in intensity after the 4 day invite came to an end, to the extent that I decided to prolong my stay by another week. I thus had plenty of time to familiarise myself with the multifaceted and extremely alluring programme and managed to visit all of the cinemas and venues hosting this lovely gathering of independent filmmakers and passionate cinephiles.

The following interview with IndieLisboa director and cofounder Miguel Valverde was taken towards the end of the festival, on the 4th of May 2023, at Culturgest, the hub of the festival, an imposing building housing several cinemas as well as art spaces and a trendy cafe.

It was one of the most surprising interviews ever taken, Miguel Valverde, a most accomplished raconteur, told me some delightful stories about the festival that I wouldn’t have got to know otherwise. Time could not have been more wisely spent…

Dana Knight: I’m very very curious about the history of IndieLisboa, you are one of the cofounders, you were there from the very beginning, what can you tell me about it?

Miguel Valverde: This association IndieLisboa came from another association that was called Zero em Comportamento like the film, Zero de conduite, by Jean Vigo. That was an arthouse exhibitor and a cinema location in Lisbon. And in 2001 we started doing some presentations of films there during the week and we had a specific kind of audience, we had three screenings a day and we worked more or less like a thematic monthly programme. We were very connected to the people from the University, our audience was really young at that time but this cinema was also an Indian cinema. So our films were playing during the week and at the weekend it was Bollywood films for another specific audience. And  then this community started having some problems and they couldn’t continue having the cinema and we were depending on them because they were renting the place. And when they decided to stop, our screenings also came to an end.  So we stopped our activity in 2003 and had to rethink what to do with this audience we had. And I had a previous experience of being a programmer of a film festival, in the Algarve, it was an amateur short film festival.

Where in the Algarve?

It was all over the Algarve, we had screenings in Portimao, Faro, Loule, Lagoa, Lagos, Albufeira, Tavira. And although it started as an amateur film festival, in the last years when I worked there it became more professional. And Rui previously worked with Paolo Branco in Cinema King, the main arthouse cinema in Lisbon. And then we met our third colleague, Nuno XXX who used to work for the Cinemateca Portuguesa and by that time he decided to quit his job because he was not very happy with the programming, with the direction the Cinemateca took. And we all met at Berlin Film Festival 2003 and decided to put all our efforts together and create a festival in Lisbon. Which was like a myth, because we knew so many people who tried to do that in Lisbon and it never worked. For a several reasons. It was a utopic idea. In spite of this we decided to apply for financial help from the National Institute of Cinema, we succeeded and then we applied to the City Hall and they also decided to support us. So in September 2004 we had our first edition but since we didn’t want to have the festival in September we decided to run the second edition in April 2005, 6 months later. We were organising 2 editions at the same time. And since the first edition went very well, people had it fresh on their mind, and when it came to our second edition it was amazing. 

In our first edition we had 12,000 spectators and 6 months later we had 20,000. So after that we decided to quit the other jobs we held and to dedicate ourselves entirely and exclusively to the festival. 

This reminds me of how the short film festival in Vila do Conde started, the director Miguel Diaz told me a similar story…

In fact, these festivals are very related, we are close friends. They started sooner than us, we used to be their audience. We had lots of conversations with them regarding our idea  but we knew from the beginning that we wanted to create a festival of feature-length movies and films of all durations. But shorts have a major role in our festival too. 

I watched two short film programmes from the International Competition and I was impressed. Also they were quite different from what you see in other film festivals. 

Yes, we created from the very beginning an audience for shorts. It’s very common that film festivals that screen the same features we screen, have a very small programme of shorts or only national. Or if it’s international the section is not competitive. Or a kind of “Best of” what has been screened in other festivals. Here we have curated shorts since our first edition, we had three competition programmes and they were all sold out immediately. There was a year when we had ten programmes of shorts, all in competition but we thought it’s a lot and now we have seven. 

You know, Radu Jude won our festival in 2007 with his first short. This is one example but I can tell you more.Yuri Ancarani was here also with all his short films, Eduardo Williams, so many now famous directors came here as young people, super excited that we’re showing their films. Also the Belgian director Bas Devos was here in competition in 2009 with his first short and said that IndieLisboa was one of the few festivals that selected his short. Of course when you created this excitement with the shorts, when they make a feature film, they still remember how well-treated they were and how the festival gave them attention and a spotlight. So when they come back to the festival, they also recognise the important work we are doing with the shorts. 

How about the retrospectives, do you have a particular focus for them?

In our second edition, the retrospective was dedicated to Jia Zhangke, he had by this time only three features and we already decided to pay tribute to him. But two years later he won Venice with Still Life. Jia Zhangke is a really close friend of us and a friend of the festival because even when people were not noticing his films that much in the beginning, we were already spotlighting him. 

We tend and I hope we succeed to anticipate things. A Portuguese film critic was writing about our 20th anniversary and was saying that in 2007 we did a programme called “A German Cinema” which was supposed to highlight contemporary filmmakers from the 70s to the 90s. And he said it’s absolutely amazing to see that the three German filmmakers that were in competition in Berlinale this year, Angela Schanelec , Christoph Hochhäusler and Christian Petzold were featured in our programme with their first shorts and features, they were already spotlighted there in 2007 and now they are the best representatives of German cinema. And in 2007 we could see and understand what they did in the beginning, what were their main themes in the 90s. It is really interesting to see how we can anticipate things in the future by looking at the present. This for us is not trying to guess what the future hold, it’s because we believe in the films. 

This is fascinating, I can see a book about the story of the festival, written by you with the help of a journalist maybe…

It will actually happen for our 25th edition, we have already invited someone to help us write it, a

Portuguese film critic who has been writing about the festival for the past 20 years, Francisco Ferreira, from the newspaper Expresso. He was always so present interviewing directors. We still have five years to think about it. 

I would love for you to say something about the sections Silvestre and Mouth of Madness, there seems to be a similarity between them, Mouth of Madness is like Silvestre but more extreme. How did these sections come to be? Silvestre means “wild” in Portuguese, something uncultivated, from the forest, is that correct?

Silvestre is like the wild strawberries from the film by Ingmar Bergman. It’s also the name of our favourite films from the whole festival, by João César Monteiro, it’s the first appearance of Maria de Medeiros. She was in Pulp Fiction but her first role was in Silvestre. The film has a very interesting story, picture this: the director shot the entire film and on the day of the closing party of the film, suddenly there was a little girl and when he saw her he said, “No, this is the little girl that I’ve been looking for for my film and didn’t find”. So he talked to his producers and they reshot the film one year later with her. They changed everything, except some scenes where she did not appear. And they did this with no money because everyone had already been paid but everyone understood this crazy idea. That a film is a crazy idea and  if you can reshoot an entire feature film again, everything is possible. So Silvestre is for more established directors who are still trying to do things differently, do wild things, this is the concept of this section. It was born from two previous sections, one called Observatory and another called  Emerging Cinema. We did a fusion of these two and we created Silvestre which is more focused now, we know exactly what we want from this section. 

And Mouth of Madness came from the idea that we did not have space for dark comedies, films that are, you used the word “extreme” and this is a good word, films that were related to fantastic cinema or terror or horror. They were in different sections of the festival but we didn’t have a lot much attendance for these kind of films because people were expecting different things from the festival. So we decided to create a specific section for them and give it a name, this is not only a collection of films but also a marathon of films, we have a specific event called: Marathon – Mouth of Madness that will happen tomorrow, that people can attend from 11pm to 6am. 

So people go to see all the films in this section overnight…

Yes , they arrive just before midnight and leave the cinema when it’s daylight outside. We have three features and the whole package of shorts. So you see a condensed Mouth of Madness during one night, it’s like like Reverie Night or Dream Night. 

This is amazing because the cinema needs to stay open overnight and you can’t have that in many cities nowadays. Which cinema is showing the Marathon?

Cinema Ideal. 

I knew it!

And you have a ticket for the entire event so you can leave for 1H, go to a bar to have a drink, and return. We are selling 199 tickets. 

So instead of going clubbing on Saturday night, you have the option to go see movies until dawn. 

Exactly!

This is such an interesting idea, I don’t know of any other film festival that is doing this, is it something completely original?

I don’t know, there are so many film festivals in the world, more than 20,000. 

Actually La Scala in London was doing this in the 70s. They used to do a Horror Marathon. 

We started doing it in 2018. 

Are there any other secrets and surprises at this film festival that I don’t know about?

Have you heard of IndieDate?

A filmmaker told me about it, he said he went on such a date but the girl didn’t show up!

Ah! Ok! This is one crazy idea for our 20th anniversary and I still don’t know how it went because it took place last night and I wasn’t attending the screening. But the idea was that people would buy tickets for this specific screenings, and they get not only drinks for the party we had last night but people don’t know our matching. 

So it’s analogue matching!

Yes, people were given a questionnaire to fill in and based on their cinephile taste and other things, we are matching them. So they receive a ticket and they are going to sit next to their date. This is not totally original because Rotterdam tried to do something similar this year but we did an upgrade, everything is organised by us.

So basically you want to see more love in the world, more connection…

Yes! It came from the idea that several of our festival staff met their partners here at the festival, people from our team, or volunteers, or film critics, or programmers. We know many stories, most of them have children already. Our main coproducer started as a volunteer in 2004, the other festival director started in 2005 as a programmer and we have plenty of people who started in 2008, 2009, so we know each other very well and our festival is like a family. 

What other novelties have you come up with for this year’s anniversary edition?

Cinema in the Pool is an event that we are organising for the first time this year, two screenings for children and one for adults. It was something we started thinking about in 2017 but we had so many problems in how to implement it. During the pandemic we had time to scout all the pools in Lisbon, and we had the time to talk it over. It all finally came together on Sunday. We knew we had a producer who could make it happen. Also last night’s party at Palacio Grillo?????, I was so surprised we can organise an event like this because there are so many things you have to do. How did we find all these people…

The show was amazing. 

Yes, and everything was organised by us. I know my team and I was so happy we managed to pull this off.  

As a director, you can’t oversee everything, you need to trust your people…

That’s why we have a board with three directors, we supervise specific things. I’m more responsible for the industry events, professional events and the Portuguese Film Fund and the Co-production Forum, the Indie Lab, everything to do with the Industry and sponsorship of the festival, the budget of the festival, partnerships, like the Smart7 network. My colleague Carlos is responsible for the production and the guest department, and Susanna is overseeing the programming team and the other activities of the festival. Since we are all artistic directors, we all get involved in curating several sections. I’m responsible for the National Competition, my colleague Carlos for the IndieMusic section, Susanna is responsible for Silvestre. 

This being the 20th anniversary edition, what transformations do you envisage going forward?

I never liked the idea of thinking about the past. It’s why these 20 years for me came super fast. 

You mean you don’t like the feeling of nostalgia?

Yes. In general Portuguese people really love nostalgia but I’m not that kind of person and so even in this 20th edition, the only thing related to the past we did was that thing in the trailer of each section highlighting films that were screened in the past 20 years. This is the only nostalgic thing about the past, the fact that these names were present here at the festival. 

So you’re very much looking forward to the future?

Yes. For instance in the future we would like to have more things related to Artificial Intelligence, we did a talk about this subject yesterday. We believe that cinema is going to become, because of the gaming, etc, more of an experience. We should have something related to this, not only watching films in the cinema. This is our topic for the next years, how to get people connected by this experience called cinema. And also we intend to produce a new film. I don’t know if you’re aware but in our 10th edition we produced a feature film. I personally produced it. The idea was to invite four directors who had films in the festival and who won our main award, Denis Côté, Dominga Sotomayor, a Chilean director, Marie Losier, a French filmmaker, and Gabriel Abrantes, the Portuguese representative. We invited them to spend time here in Lisbon, not as tourists but as a locals. They stayed in our houses for a period of time, they lived our lives, they bought their groceries in our supermarkets, they went to the same bars we were going, met our friends, they had this experience of living a life in Lisbon. So later on they came to shoot a film here. And this is composed of four shorts that function as a feature. Gabriel Abrantes‘s short was in Competition in Berlinale, Marie Losier‘s film was in Forum Expanded in Berlinale, Dominga was in Competition in Rotterdam, and Denis Côté was in Nouveau Cinema Film Festival . 

And as a feature we premiered in Torino Film Festival. But these shorts had a very long life and we sold the feature to HBO. It’s from 2015. So we are thinking of returning to this idea because Dominga would like to shoot a sequel to her story which is about an encounter between two people. She wants to shoot again with them, one of them is Joao Canijo, the director of Mal Viver/Viver Mal, he worked as an actor back then, and Dominga’s own mother who’s one of the most famous actresses in Chile, she wants to portray her mother again 10 years later. And we want to invite new filmmakers to be part of this project.