17—19/02/2021
online screening
The Nothing Factory
as part of Cinema of Crises film review
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The Nothing Factory
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[A Fábrica de Nada] directed by Pedro Pinho, Portugal 2017, 177'
- An example of contemporary political cinema whose originality was recognized by the FIPRESCI jury at the 2017 Cannes festival. “An evocative activist film that blows the boundaries between reality, fiction, theatre and sociological discourse, leading to an unsettling and provocative cinematic experience”, the jury wrote. The factory from the title is located in Lisbon; it used to manufacture lifts until the owners began to secretly remove the equipment in order to shift production somewhere cheaper. Not only does a group of workers strike, but they also want to build a cooperative on the ruins of the factory and resume production on their own. We follow their uprising, ardent debates, joyful fantasies, and moments of doubt. Pedro Pinho’s debut is a drama, a musical and a comedy, all-in-one; it’s also an elegy on the death of the working man, a film that bravely faces the most challenging issues of our time, looking into the past of the engaged cinema and inquiring about the possibility of an artistic protest. The kind of film we need when the Earth is shaking.
