20 Aug SEMPRE by Luciana Fina
Venetian Nights 2024
SEMPRE
by Luciana Fina Portugal, 2024, 107′, colour b/wScreenplay: Luciana Fina 05 SEPTEMBER 13:15 – Sala LagunaV.O. sub ENPress, Industry05 SETTEMBRE 21:00 – Sala LagunaV.O. sub ITSegue QA Reservation required on giornatedegliautori.com
Fifty years after 25 April 1974, Luciana Fina revisits the images of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, drawing on the archives of the Cinemateca Portuguesa and RTP. Starting from the films of the era, SEMPRE rethinks the transition from fascism to liberation and the process of building a new country, crafting its emancipation and future. It is a tribute to cinema that has interfered in history and breathes new life into an extraordinary moment in time. The film covers the chokehold of the Salazar Regime and the PIDE (International and State Defense Police), the student occupations in 1969, the Armed Forces Movement in 1974, and the dreams, programs and perspectives of the PREC period (Ongoing Revolutionary Process), as well as the “Verão quente”, or Hot Summer of ’75, and decolonization. Above all, it reintroduces us to the gestures of great filmmakers who sprang into action, together with artists, songwriters, composers and radio directors.
“The images of the past watch us and demand our presence. Rescuing the visual heritage of these archives also means questioning cinema and its gestures and developing an idea of the future. Revisiting is not about the past alone; it is an exploration of possible shifts between past and present. Using the mixed media art of montage – meant as a way of producing meaning through the combination of heterogeneous elements and times – I seek the tension of a cinema at once reflective and generative, so that the encounter between the Then and the Now may take place. Akin to memory, this process is not a return to the identical, but something that rekindles the potential of what has been. What seems to be at stake is the chance to make the finite unfinished again, retrieving the suspended image, and allowing what has happened to reinvent itself, thus relaunching the call – or the right, now under threat – to imagine the future.” (Luciana Fina)
Luciana Fina is an Italian filmmaker and visual artist who has worked in Lisbon since 1991. A curator of programs and editions for the Cinemateca Portuguesa and a researcher in Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon, Fina directed her first documentary in 1997, taking her place in the generation of filmmakers who reinvented the documentary film genre in Portugal. Her films, video installations and site-specificworks are fixtures at film festivals and international exhibitions; they are featured in the collections of the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Nouveaux Medias at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and CACE (the State Contemporary Art Collection). Her films Andromeda and SEMPRE stem from her work with film archives. On 25 April 2024, Fina inaugurated Sempre, a palavra, o sonho e a poesia na rua, a new installation created for the Cinemateca Portuguesa for the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution.