Notícias

The 26^th AVANCA International Film Festival, whose competition will take place between July 27th and 31st, celebrates a quarter of a century under the sign of the DISPLACED.

The Festival announces that the "DISPLACED are refugees, migrants, returnees, fugitives and even outlaws, outcasts, stateless people. Displaced by the force of fiction, always".

Aware of the great movements of displacement of people in times of disproportionately armed conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, Africa, to mention only the most visible, this year the AVANCA Film Festival will be a space for its visibility.
In cinema, films broaden the knowledge of conflicts and the barbarism they always generate. In AVANCA, in addition to films, the DISPLACED will be the theme of work in the Filmmaking Workshops that each year mark this event.

Around 130 films are scheduled to be screened, including features and shorts from countries on five continents, but one film will get special attention due to its uniqueness.

Over 16 years, from 2005 to 2020, Chinese filmmaker Zhandong MA, with Hong Kong production, filmed in the second special zone of Myanmar's Wa State.
During the land reform and the Cultural Revolution in China, many people fled there, making this the largest gathering point for Han nationality in the region.
In "Nowhere People" the filmmaker focuses on the life changes of Li Simei and Grandma Chen after the ban on drug cultivation. Times when their children could not return to China and their identities were not recognized. A place that became a marginalized geopolitical system, an "enclave" without identity
This long and controversial film by a filmmaker who continues to work and live in Chengdu (China), looks at politics, history, drugs, and how individuals in the "Golden Triangle" tragically fend for themselves. The lives of Li and Chen, who have left their hometowns, disappear with the course of history in the once poppy-filled mountainous land of northern Myanmar.
Displaced people who survive where the concept of "nation" is only an illusion.

Zhandong MA states that, "When drugs become a generational evil, individual tragedy becomes another "missing" in a complex historical and geopolitical context. What is the future of a symbolic enclave without a "name" or "identity"? A story of desperate survival mirrors the story of a nation. All history becomes the 'glory' of the present, but the individuals who carry it, always bring with them "suffering".

It will be 4 hours and 15 minutes that, in a world premiere, the AVANCA Festival will screen at Cinema Vida in Ovar, one of the venues of the festival, on Tuesday the 26^th from 4pm.