World Premiere
The director returns to his parents’ home and talks them into playing roles in a film he is making, addressing delicate personal and familial subjects in the process. This is an extremely engaging and reflective documentary that explores family relations in a low-key, often humorous way that offsets the seriousness of some of the subjects. The film is also a visual treat, taking us on a tour around his parents’ house and community in Lisbon, while it plays with images of youth, age, and the relationship between memory, film, and time. From discussions about mortality to imitating Marcello Mastroianni, Ponto Final strikes a beautiful balance between the family’s personal lives and their distractions for the camera.
Community Partner
Elvira Beraza, Jesús López
Spain/Portugal
2022
In Spanish and Portuguese with English subtitles
Featured in:
International Shorts: Personal Journeys
The films in this shorts program are all about discovery. Beautiful and thought-provoking voyages of internal and external discovery that honour relations and history, while encountering stimuli that promote a new understanding of self.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
All the Lovers in the Night
A lonely proofreader's isolated world begins to open through an unlikely friendship with a gentle physics teacher. Based on Mieko Kawakami's acclaimed novel, this luminous drama is a delicate meditation on loneliness, intimacy, and self-discovery.
Clarissa
Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa brings Mrs. Dalloway to present-day Lagos, with Sophie Okonedo playing the titular society hostess opposite David Oyelowo, Ayo Edebiri, and India Amarteifio in a Nigerian vision of class, privilege, and past lives.
Image: © Courtesy of Elevation Pictures
Opening Gala: The Debut
VIFF is honoured to open the festival with this special by-invitation screening of Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut. When meek Mona (Julianne Moore) lands a part in a musical, she fully inhabits her character, but grows increasingly untethered from reality.
Árru
Set against the mountains and fjords of northern Norway, Árru follows reindeer herder Maia as a proposed copper mine threatens her Sámi community, forcing her to fight to protect both her community and the land that sustains it.
The Beloved
When Esteban Martínez, an acclaimed director with violent tendences, invites his estranged daughter to star in his latest project, the stage is set for a familial reconnection. But as tensions flare, questions about his intentions rise to the surface.
MODES 1
Archive and the land reveal other ways of seeing, ensuring that what is meant to endure cannot be erased.
Credits
Producer
Mireia Graell Vivancos
Screenwriter
Miguel López Beraza, Mireia Graell Vivancos
Cinematography
Alberto González Casal
Editor
Pedro Collantes
Production Design
Patricia Huguet
Original Music
Laura Casaponsa
Director
Chad Charlie
Madrid-based filmmaker Miguel López Beraza combines architecture with filmmaking. He was awarded a scholarship to take part in the DoCNomads Master’s Degree in Documentary Filmmaking and, afterwards, another one to attend the advanced screenwriting workshop at Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba. His first film, Walls (2014), received the 2015 Goya Award in Spain for Best Documentary Short. His next work, With All Our Cameras (2016), premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and won the Grand Prix at T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival’s European Short Film Competition.