Poet + Leila's Brothers

18:45 — Poeta [Poet]
by Darezhan Omirbayev

Jean-Luc Godard praised him as one of the “most surprising directors of our time”, a few years after Darezhan Omirbayev presented his debut film in Locarno, where he won an award. He continues to surprise us with Poeta [Poet], his new work, which Mathieu Macheret, from Le Monde, considered one of the “most beautiful films of the Berlinale”, in which the “Kazakh filmmaker, like a good Dostoyevskian, interrogates, through an allegory, the disappearance of poetry in our contemporary world. Its young hero, a poet lost in an age that was too prosaic, posed a very important question to the German festival: what is our relationship with beauty today?”

Didar is a poet absorbed by his daily work in a newspaper. In these times of mass consumption, technological triumph, commercialization and social networks, few are interested in poetry. Reading the story of a famous 19th century Kazakh poet executed by power, Didar recognizes the harshness and demands of his vocation, struggling between pain and joy, successes and failures.

21:00 — Os Irmãos de Leila  [Leila's Brothers]
by Saeed Roustaee

Despite the difficulties it is going through (there are currently several filmmakers in prison in Iran) Iranian cinema has again brought us, in recent years, a group of young filmmakers who surprised and filled us with astonishment, as Abbas Kiarostami or later Jafar Panahi, for example, had done a few decades ago. Saeed Roustaee, whose portentous A Lei de Teerão premiered in Portugal a few months ago, has a new film, this Os Irmãos de Leila  [Leila's Brothers], premiered at the Cannes Festival, where he received the International Critics Award (for the time being banned in Iran) , and which is also in the LEFFEST'22 Competition.

At 40 years old, Leila has spent her life taking care of her parents and four siblings. The family argues constantly and is deep in debt. While the brothers try to survive, Leila wants to create a business to save her family from poverty, discovering that her father hides an inheritance. This discovery will weaken the family dynamics, permanently on the verge of implosion.