Natxo Checa

Here in Lisbon

Welcome to Lisbon: there are mermaids by the Tagus and birds flying over the old city; there are mad scientists and singing fish; lost tourist guides and lost tourists; fado and sad guitars. What a weird city you may think - but no. Lisbon is about being different, sarcastic, welcoming to foreigners even in an economic crisis. Different directors became fascinated by our strangeness. We became fascinated by these directors. The city is never the same in these four episodes, here in Lisbon.

Freud und Friends

A headlong dive into the deepest, silliest recesses of Abrantes’s unconscious.

Taprobana

In this short comedy, Luis Vaz de Camoes, the greatest Portuguese renaissance poet, struggles creatively while engaging in a hedonistic, coprophagic, and drug addled lifestyle. The film follows the poet, and his lover Dinamene, as he writes his masterpiece, the epic poem "Os Lusiadas." He travels from the cacophony of the Indic jungles, surrounded by allegorical elephants and rhyming macaques, to the frontier of Heaven and Hell, where he is confronted by his fantasy: fame and immortality.

Bibliografia

In the summer of 1969, four friends built a raft to travel down two Portuguese rivers from the center of the country to Lisbon. Forty years later, the son of one of these men reported this event in a book of poems, as a metaphor of the Portuguese travel literature of the 16Th and 17Th centuries. After, it occurred to him to turn the poems into a real event, to invite some friends to reenact the raft journey and exhibit texts from those peregrinations. His brother went along to film the floating recital.