Lisboners

Lisbon is a city built over hills. You walk by the river, in front of the Pombal illumined downtown, built on the wreckage of 1755's earthquake and you can view down-up the whole historical centre, protected by the castle. Beautiful view. Go up, reach that castle, and look down, the opposite view, embraced by the river, also great, also gorgeous. The light is special, every cinema lover should know that, Wenders knows it (Lisbon Story). The colors are soft pale yellow, water pink, roofs argyle red. When you get to the castle, pick up a pair of field-glasses, overview the city, look to the other side of the river, and closely the old parts. yellow becomes, vivid blue, you'll get black and white, high contrasts, and a city that doesn't come in postcards. Through those field-glasses, you'll see this film.

Lisbon, multi-cultural, multi-layered city. Many languages, many cultures, many differences. I'm glad i got to watch this one just a few days after Alice. The world depicted here is the world that makes Alice possible. This informs the world of Alice. The depiction of immigration as, at the same time, one of the most natural phenomena in our global times and one of the most system exploited ones is the theme that conducts us through the lives of various immigrants, giving us the full portrait, the unmasking of vanities, feelings of progress and happy futures. Of course this is uneven. It has beautiful art shots, in simple great combination of music, routine sounds, off voice narration and real life shots. But it also has highly zoomed no cinematic quality scenes, useful but artless, or scenes filmed in an almost amateur way. Of course... But it holds a special place for what it shows and for the problems it depicts.

It's built with boards, episodes, character discontinuity, racial discontinuity, language discontinuity, color discontinuity, mood discontinuity. Such as big cities are today.

This is not artless, and Tréfaut knows what he does. Watch it, and keep Alice on your side, for higher cinematic affairs.

My evaluation: 4/5

http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

During the second half of 19th century and the first three quarters of 20th century Portugal was a country of emigrant labourers. Fifty per cent of its active population emigrated to evade poverty and seek better life conditions abroad. But now things changed and Portugal is a country of immigrants mainly after its admission in the European Union and the collapse of the USSR and other East European socialist regimes. Brazilians, Ukrainians, Russians, natives of the former Portuguese African colonies (like Cape Verde for instance) and also Asians came (and are still coming) to Portugal also in search of better life because they always thought that we in the west are all (or almost all) rich people so they could become rich too. This documentary movie shows us in a very thorough and realistic way the life of these people in Lisbon. They are only "lisboetas" (lisboners) by adoption therefore there is some irony in the movie title. We can see their troubles in all aspects of their life beginning with the difficulty in getting residence visas for which they have to wait for hours in queues at the Service of Foreigners to be interviewed by officials in Portuguese despite the fact that most of them don't master the Portuguese language. Then it's the labour problem. Most of them are exploited by unscrupulous employers who take advantage of the fact that many of them are illegal immigrants with no visas and may be denounced to the authorities at any time and get expelled. Most of them work in the building construction with very low salaries and no protection. In the movie we saw one of them saying that he got 25 euros for a 12 hour work. Then we are shown their everyday life, we hear their talking on the phone to their families who stayed at home and those conversations are very moving sometimes. We hear their opinions about the country where they are now, some favourable some others not. We see their various religious practices (Muslim, Orthodox Christian, etc). But the most charming scenes are those where their children (many of them already born in Portugal) play, talk, are interviewed and give also their infantile but interesting opinions and look at us through the camera with their beautiful innocent eyes. This movie is an important and true document of a reality very often unknown to the Portuguese citizens but that deserves to be fully known.