October 11, 2023




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WHERE ARE WE GOING TO LIVE?


A Film Series 

on Housing Problems

programmed by Andy Rector


dedicated to Beatriz Duarte



OCTOBER 12 - 18

CINEMA IDEAL - LISBOA

One week, 17 films

All programs begin at 9pm 

5 € admission



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Series will travel to Porto, Casa das Artes, November 4 - 12. 

Supported by OPTEC FILMES upon their upcoming dvd/streaming release of the film AS OPERAÇOES SAAL (OPERATION SAAL, 2007, João Dias). 

Introduction and small summaries of each program are below (em português, ligeiramente truncado, aqui)More material (articles, notes, news of guests) will follow as the series develops. 


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Introduction

A series of films about the betrayal of the right to housing, a right unborn. Not meant to be a sociological event, but simply a selection of films––seven nights at the movies––on the housing problem, the eviction problem, the exploitation problem, pulled from the history of cinema, internationally.

Films made on the side of oppressed people, the cheated, the evicted, the harassed, the repressed: elderly pensioners, unemployed youth, strikers, house builders, miners, bricklayers, piece-workers, alcoholics, post-war villagers trying to rebuild, cafeteria cooks, security guards, immigrants, mothers, sisters, hobos, temporary workers, people without homes.

Films showing the economic continuity and human toll of the housing problem over decades––the absolute lock on property relations, the dictatorship of the market over people, then and now.

Here we see legal intrigues, corruption, speculation, theft, eviction, police––the basics of an unchanging capitalism. Invader, redeveloper, kidnapper, exiler, swindler. Orphan-maker, widow-maker. "Che farsa!" an Italian villager yells when being newly told of market realities. “A lot of departed spirits walk with me…” says Cape Verdean Ventura, standing in the aftermath, in Amadora, eating the one small soup his friend Pango can spare.

A group of films that hold, like a silo, historical and human detail on the monstrous inequities. The life and death involved, the solidarity needed. As José Sinho Baessa de Pina (community representative in Casal da Boba and organizer with the agit-group VIDA JUSTA) says: "The spirit of unity and solidarity is a process," one torn apart precisely when “everyone is worried about their home”. Many souls in these films survive through some kind of solidarity: fellow workers prevent an eviction; a snitch threatening a Hooverville shantytown is thwarted; a mother's memory of "back home" is shared for strength; a warning is passed on before it's too late; the simple twist of a screwdriver of a telephone company worker restores the unpaid line of a desperate man…

Classical film, B-film, epic, questing documentary, horror film, propaganda, melodrama, music film, student film, silent film, militant film, plus the unclassifiable. Many of these films are of the popular cinema, if not “becoming-popular” (as Bernard Eisenschitz wrote of Dudow/Brecht, Straub/Huillet).

In the love and hate, dream and nightmare, hope and despair that cinema projects, one finds it has always been concerned with housing, seen from the bottom (and sometimes the top––rarely the middle). 
Chaplin’s Tramp was a so-called “homeless”. Pedro Costa: "Cinema was always here to serve the defenseless. We risk forgetting that. (...) Perhaps these scenes in which respect is shown towards them can make us see the injustice."




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A small contribution to the fight against the grotesque rent and food prices impoverishing and displacing the majority of us now. 
In solidarity with the upcoming VIDA JUSTA-organized protest in Lisbon (Rossio), October 21, demanding:  "End the rising costs, we want houses to live in, transport for all, wage increases, no police repression in our neighborhoods."




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OCTOBER 12, Thursday


AS OPERAÇÕES SAAL 

Operation SAAL 

 2007, João Dias. 127 min. Portugal 

*Director João Dias in attendance* 




A dream… Operation SAAL was the April 25th,1974 Carnation Revolution’s most important reply to the housing problem: the people would take into their own hands the building process of their own homes, working in close collaboration with architects. What happened? João Dias's documentary is a jocular, sometimes bitter, revisiting of the plan, the sites, and people involved, 30 years after the Coup, energetically told with a dialectic of past and present voices: tenants associations, workers and architects. More information.




OCTOBER 13, Friday


LES MAISONS DE LA MISÈRE 

Houses of Poverty 

1936, Henri Storck. 29 min. Belgium

Francês com legendas em inglês


MISÈRE AU BORINAGE 

Misery in Borinage 

1934, Henri Storck, Joris Ivens. 34 min. Belgium

Francês com legendas em inglês 


KUHLE WAMPE ODER: WEM GEHÖRT DIE WELT? 

Kuhle Wampe or: To Whom Does the World Belong?

1932, Slatan Dudow, Bertolt Brecht. 70 min. Germany 

Alemão com legendas em inglês

*Portugal Premiere of 2020 Restoration* 


Sessão: 2 horas 15 min, mais intervalo 








Three films in which dismal living and working conditions, eviction and dispossession do not come with the inevitability of an earthquake or flood, but are seen critically and agitated against, cause and effect relations unmasked. Films which intended to intervene on reality.



OCTOBER 14, SATURDAY


THE GOLDEN LOUIS 

1909, D.W. Griffith. 7 min. E.U.A. 

Filme mudo, legendas em inglês sem acompanhamento musical 


THE USURER 

1910, D.W. Griffith. 17 min. E.U.A. 

Filme mudo, legendas em inglês sem acompanhamento musical 


ONE IS BUSINESS, THE OTHER CRIME 

1912, D.W. Griffith. 15 min. E.U.A. 

Filme mudo, legendas em inglês sem acompanhamento musical 


IL RITORNO DEL FIGLIO PRODIGO –– UMILIATI: CHE NIENTE DI FATTO O TOCCATO DA LORO, DI USCITO DALLE MANI LORO, RISULTASSE ESENTE AL DIRITTO DI QUALCHE ESTRANEO (OPERAI, CONTADINI - SEGUITO E FINE) 

The Return of the Prodigal Son –– Humiliated: That Nothing Produced or  Touched by Them, Coming From Their Hands, Proves Free from the Claim of Some Stranger (Workers, Peasants - Continuation and End) 

O Retorno do Filho Pródigo –– Humilhados: Que Nada Feito ou Tocado Por Eles, Nada Saído das Mãos Deles, Resultasse Livre do direito de Algum Estranho (Operários, Camponeses - Continuação e Final) 

2003, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. 64 min. Itália, França, Alemanha

Italiano com legendas em português


O NOSSO HOMEM 

2010, Pedro Costa. 26 min. Portugal 

Português e crioulo com legendas em português 


sessão: 2 horas 3 min, sem intervalo 













Five fables. Three by D.W. Griffith on the evils of the economy, accumulation, corruption, the tenuousness of charity and class reconciliation; with forms of montage that seem to express outrage that rich and poor coexist at all. One by Straub/Huillet, HUMILIATED: No sooner does an impromptu commune in post-war Italy establish itself and begin to overcome its internal challenges, does a zombie of the cadastre, possessed by propriety, arrive and declare that everything they've cultivated is already owned: the land, the water, even their wills (to clear the forest of landmines, to produce wheat non-industrially...). And finally, Pedro Costa's O NOSSO HOMEM, about the struggle of a Portuguese-born child of Cape Verdean immigrants to gain an ounce of peace, under threat of expulsion, as if not a citizen, alongside the story of a bricklayer, possibly beaten to death by racists in Amadora.



OCTOBER 15, Sunday


CHICAGO CALLING ! 

1951, John Reinhardt. 75 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas 


BUNKER HILL 

1956, Kent Mackenzie. 18 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas 


THE FINAL INSULT 

1997, Charles Burnett. 55 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas

 

sessão: 2 horas 28 min. mais intervalo 











A concrete focus, in two films, on a specific place, Bunker Hill, downtown Los Angeles. One, CHICAGO CALLING, about a penniless recovering alcoholic who must suddenly find $53 to pay his phone bill, to hear news of his faraway wife and daughter, on whom his life depends. The problem of utility bills must not be left out of any housing rights to speak of. And another, BUNKER HILL, a soft-spoken film on the elderly pensioners who live on "the Hill", now threatened by commercial redevelopment, the demolition of their home and community. Then, a rough video-poem by Charles Burnett on being homeless, living out of one’s car in Los Angeles while working a low-wage job as a “temporary accountant” at Bank of America.



OCTOBER 16, Monday


MAN’S CASTLE 

A Vida é um Sonho 

1933, Frank Borzage. 75 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas 

**4K digital copy** 


ANNUSHKA 

1959, Boris Barnet. 89 min. U.R.S.S. 

Russo com legendas em inglês 


sessão: 2 horas 44 min. mais intervalo 











A double bill. One Hollywood film (Borzage), one Soviet (Barnet)––a love story, a family story––on the restless yearning for a decent home amidst war: class war, world war. On the importance of being stubborn, even while living under or fleeing intolerable circumstances.


OCTOBER 17, Tuesday


MINGUS 

1968, Thomas Reichman. 58 min. E.U.A. 

Idioma inglês sem legendas 


EL BRUTO 

O​​ Bruto 

1953, Luis Buñuel 81 min. México 

Espanhol com legendas em português 


sessão: 2 horas 19 min. mias intervalo 








What has eviction achieved? It has ruined Charlie Mingus's dream of a new music school in the Lower East Side, New York. 

Plus, a popular Mexican melodrama by Luis Buñuel, a tale and dissection of the family ties between a landlord, a "Brute”, and a group of tenants organizing themselves.



OCTOBER 18, Wednesday


JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA 

Colossal Youth

2006, Pedro Costa. 155 min. Portugal 

Português e crioulo com legendas em português 

Guest:  José Sinho Baessa de Pina, who appears in the film as the "Gulbenkian Security Guard", and is today a community representative of Associação Cavaleiros São Brás and VIDA JUSTA.





In 2006, Pedro Costa makes JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA (COLOSSAL YOUTH), an unshakeable epic of a people in transition: the relocation of the former inhabitants of shantytown Fontaínhas to the new social housing complex Casal da Boba, in Amadora, outside Lisbon. We follow Ventura––Cape Verdean immigrant, pioneer, builder of Fontaínhas, injured construction worker––who spends his nights reciting a love letter, trapped in 1974––for him, a terror––and his days with “his children” Vanda, Nhurro, Gustavo, Sinho, Paulo, in the new neighborhood, and Bete in the last house of Fontaínhas. “Templo, cabana, deus-lares…” ("Temple, shack, house-diety...") says the Housing Agent showing Ventura his new Boba apartment. “...house's full of spiders,” Ventura replies...


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*The series title ONDE VAMOS MORAR? - WHERE ARE WE GOING TO LIVE? comes from a song lyric by José Afonso, from “Canção Do Desterro (Emigrantes)” - "Song of Exile (Emigrants)". 


With deep thanks to: João Dias, Abel Ribeiro Chaves, José Sinho Baessa de Pina, Rodrigo Dâmaso, Charles Burnett, Pedro Costa, Aurora Neves, Maria Capelo, José Neves, Mosfilm Cinema Concern, Christophe Clavert, Marta Mateus, Filipe Baixinho, Anna Neher, Sara Jesus, Billy Woodberry, Torpeda, Eliel Santos, Cinema Ideal, Kyriakos Dionysopoulos.



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