The full programme for Doclisboa 2026 has now been unveiled. Running from 15 to 25 October, the festival returns to its usual venues — Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa and Cinema Ideal — with a performance also taking place this year at the Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre. In total, the 24th edition presents 198 films from 51 countries, including 34 world premieres, 13 international premieres, three European premieres and 32 Portuguese films, spanning generations, geographies and different ways of making and thinking about cinema.
Opening and closing this edition are two filmmakers who turn their own relationship with cinema into the very material of their films. Doclisboa opens with Asphalt Guerrilla, by Edgar Pêra, which takes Manuel Ricardo Sousa’s book of the same name as its starting point, bringing together the accounts of a former FP-25 operative with the filmmaker’s own memories of the turbulent 1980s, through archive material, fiction and artificial intelligence. Closing the festival, Alain Cavalier, at the age of 95, presents Thanks for Coming, a new and final chapter in his cinematic diary, in which everyday gestures and encounters become the stuff of cinema.
This year’s International Competition comprises 11 films, including seven world premieres, three international premieres and one European premiere. The Portuguese Competition also features 11 films (see list below), all of them world premieres. The International Competition includes films by filmmakers already familiar to festival audiences, amongst them João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, alongside others whose work is being presented in Portugal for the first time, in a selection marked by remarkable sophistication, aesthetic diversity and political acuity. The Portuguese Competition, features new works by Inês Oliveira, Ico Costa, Pedro Neves and Manuel Mozos, alongside filmmakers presenting their films at Doclisboa for the first time.
NEW VISIONS
New Visions once again explores the possibilities of cinema as an art form intimately connected to the experience of the present, bringing together films that move across different times, memories and histories through open and experimental forms. This edition’s guest filmmakers are France’s Sophie Roger, whose work is marked by formal freedom and radicalism, with titles including Desert Island (2014) and The Bitches (2026); and Filipino filmmaker John Torres, represented by three key films from a body of work shaped by hybrid and poetic experimentation: The Remotes (2026), Lukas the Strange (2013) and Todo todo teros (2006).
The section also features films by authors including Lee Anne Schmitt, Ben Russell, Declan Clarke, Lucía Seles, Ted Fendt and Lynne Sachs, among many others. Mariano Llinás dedicates Life of Jorge Luis Borges to the life and literary universe of the Argentine writer, drawing on his papers, books and places to search for the figure of a man for whom literature constituted a world of its own. María Aparicio brings Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion, winner of the GdA Director’s Award in Venice, in which Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía becomes the gateway to a reflection on the history of labour struggles. Denis Côté returns with Nobody’s Violence, a surprising fiction centred on a fascinating protagonist who takes us on a journey through death, love and encounters with others. Robert and June (and all the time in the world), by Jem Cohen, follows artists June Leaf and Robert Frank over the years, between Cape Breton and an ever-changing New York. In Wild Asparagus, a Portuguese-French co-production, Avi Mograbi follows his Arabic teacher, Ali Al Azhari, as he searches for the ruins of Saffuriya, the village from which he was expelled during the 1948 Nakba.
Archive takes centre stage in this edition of New Visions. In An Incomplete Calendar, Sanaz Sohrabi takes a record released in Venezuela in the 1980s as the starting point for recovering images and sounds of the Palestinian liberation struggle and Pan-Arab solidarity of the 1960s and 1970s. The Clearing, by Sabine Groenewegen, returns to Dutch colonial exploitation in Sumatra and the silenced violence of the rubber plantations through found and contemporary images. The festival also pays tribute to Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, archaeologists of images who turned the archive into a site of confrontation between History and what images may still reveal, presenting Oh! uomo, one of the duo’s major works, in which they developed their practice of the analytical camera and which concludes their trilogy devoted to the First World War.
10/20/26
16.00 TL/EM ⁄ 83’
Every Contact Leaves a Trace
10/24/25 & 10/25/26
LYNNE SACHS
A TAREFA DO TRADUTOR /
THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR
Spanning a vast period of time, this programme highlights a fascinating aspect of Sachs’s work: the central role of transmission as the persistence and renewal of memory, and as a formal and poetic principle. From a journey undertaken by two sisters to a war‑torn Vietnam, where they encounter the oral and material memory of a time they know only from television, to the story of a cousin hired to catalogue the bones of American soldiers who ends up in Brazil, translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin, this is a journey through our collective history and the ways in which our individual lives are shaped by it in unforeseen ways.
24 OUT / 16.30, CULTURGEST – PEQUENO AUD.
25 OUT / 19.00, SÃO JORGE – SALA 3
The Small Ones
Lynne Sachs
2007 • EUA / USA • 4’ • DCP
Which Way Is East: Notebooks
from Vietnam
Lynne Sachs
1994 • EUA / USA • 33’ • DCP
The Whole Poem Is a Curse
Lynne Sachs
2026 • EUA / USA • 12’ • DCP
The Task of the Translator
Lynne Sachs
2010 • EUA / USA • 11’ • DCP
The Last Happy Day
Lynne Sachs
2009 • EUA / USA • 39’ • DCP