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Aquele querido mês de agosto

("Our Beloved Month of August")
Miguel Gomes
Portugal, 2008, 150 min. 

A strange relationship exists between a father, daughter and nephew in a traveling pop band in the midst of the August music festivals that permeate the heart of rural Portugal. Fiction and documentary dance a sensual tango in this celebration of everyday life and love in August. The camera drifts endlessly through picturesque vistas, capturing unrestrained merriment, rural ritual, colorful anecdotes and vivacious characters.


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Intimidades de Shakespeare y Victor Hugo

("Intimacies of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo")
Yulene Olaizola
Mexico, 2008, 83 min. 

Within Rosa Elena Carbajal's boarding house lies a passionate and potentially explosive story. Rosa’s intelligent, artistic, humorous tenant Jorge Riosse was a deeply troubled man—possibly schizophrenic--carrying dark secrets that emerged only after his sudden death. Best documentary prize winner at festivals in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, this is a story of creativity, intimacy, homosexuality, friendship and maybe even murder.


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Juízo

("Behave")
Maria Augusta Ramos
Brazil, 2007, 90 min.

Juízo follows the process of minors who have fallen into the hands of the Brazilian legal system. Boys and girls from underprivileged backgrounds are faced with crime, ruling, and sentences handed down for theft, drug trafficking, and even murder. The film shows the process of judging and how easily we are swayed over questions involving minors breaking the law. Who really knows what to do?


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The Short Films of Susana Barriga

Susana Barriga
Cuba, 2006-2008, 50 min.

Susana Barriga’s short films exhibit a striking confidence in the authority of stark images. The primitive work performed by the road workers in Patria, while depicted in all its physicality, inevitably takes on the allure of a metaphor on the exhaustion –and persistence against all odds- of the Cuban Revolution. The quiet desperation glimpsed in the faces of the people in the little fishing village of Cómo construir un barco also speaks volumes about the quandary of staying or leaving the island. And the failed encounter of The Illusion, between Barriga and her father, an exile in London, turns the dilemma uncomfortably personal.


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Biodrama: Documentary Theater

Vivi Tellas
Argentina

An illustrated presentation followed by discussion on the issue of performance and representation in the documentary.