Cláudia Clemente

Lisbon, today. In a room of a house at Douradores Street, a man invents dreams and theorizes about them. The essence of the dreams itself becomes physical, palpable, visible. The text itself materializes in its musicality. And, in front of our eyes, this music can be felt with the ears, brain and heart. It spreads itself in the street where the man lives, in the city that he loves above all and over the entire world.

Agnès Dormes, a famous opera singer, saves Julie, a baby girl who was about to be sacrificed during a black mass. Twenty years later, the baby has turned into a beautiful energetic twenty-year-old young lady determined to find out about her origins. In Avignon, Julie manages to meet Agnès and discovers on the occasion she is not her real mother. A series of adventures will ensue and at a time Julie is nearly burned on the stake. But she eventually achieves her end and can marry, a street performer close to her heart.

A dreamlike journey seen through the eyes of a trans-human as well as a kino-symphony of voices from the multiple personas of Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon Revisited shows alternative ways of looking at and hearing the city. Celebrating its greatest phantom and confronting his ambiguous and pervasive sexuality, the film is spoken in the three languages in which Pessoa wrote, Portuguese, English and French.

A kino-investigation about spectatorship, a continuous conversation between different kinds of spectators: which one is more cinema: Citizen Kane on a mobile phone or a football game projected in a cinema theatre? What is the cinema of uncertainty? How many kinds of amazement exist? Does fear and belief precede amazement? What are the rights and duties of the spectator? Is the essay film a manifesto against voyeurism? Should spectators be paid? What amazes the spectator of this day and age?

"Oh salty sea, how much of your salt / Are tears of Portugal! / To get across you, how many mothers cried, / How many sons prayed in vain! // How many brides were never to marry / In order to make you ours, oh sea! / Was it worth it? Everything is worthy / If the soul is not small." (Fernando Pessoa)