This year’s Cinema Revisited section features as its main highlight the program “The Last Film”, which is built on the following premise: short films are, in most cases, early works in a filmmaker’s career, but they can also, more rarely, be the last. For many different reasons, the final films of directors such as Douglas Sirk, Michael Powell, Manoel de Oliveira, Godard, or Roberto Rossellini are short films. Whether by chance or due to illness, a desire for experimentation, budget constraints, or a progressive distance from the industry’s centers of power, many filmmakers defy the notion that short films are confined to the beginnings of their filmographies.

This section of the program also lends itself to commemorative events. One such example is “Back to the Future: The Curtas Generation, 25 Years Later”, which revisits, in a concise program, a key period of change in Portuguese cinema – one marked by increased visibility and production of short films, with Curtas Vila do Conde playing an integral role. The term “Curtas Generation” was first coined by Augusto M. Seabra in Público, and later adopted in a publication by the newly-founded Agência da Curta Metragem. The selection deliberately focuses on a set of lesser-seen works – at least in recent years – by four filmmakers who, in the words of Paulo Cunha and Daniel Ribas, “stood at the center of this invisible yet structural transformation of Portuguese cinema.”

Finally, this edition of Cinema Revisited also offers a tribute to David Lynch, who passed away earlier this year and whose work has long been a fixture of the festival’s program – whether through his short films (shown in 2007) or, more recently, through the program “Hollywood: Daydreams and Nightmares”, which marked the 20th anniversary of “Mulholland Drive” in the 2021 edition of Cinema Revisited. This year’s tribute features the legendary eighth episode of the most recent season of “Twin Peaks” – a piece that many have heard of, but few have actually seen (and even fewer on a cinema screen): the famous “atomic bomb episode,” which remains one of the defining elements of Lynch’s oeuvre, a surrealist journey into the depths of nightmares, and undoubtedly one of the most experimental and hallucinatory moments in the history of television