Susana de Sousa Dias Guest Artist

Artist and filmmaker. Her work explores the relationship between history and memory, questioning archives, structures of power, and contemporary conditions of visibility and listening. Her films include Natureza Morta (Still Life, 2005), 48 (2009, Grand Prix at Cinéma du Réel and FIPRESCI Prize at DOK Leipzig), Luz Obscura (Obscure Light, 2017), Fordlandia Malaise (2019), and Viagem ao Sol (Journey to the Sun, 2021, co-directed with Ansgar Schaefer). Her practice also extends to installation, with works including Natureza Morta | Stilleben (2010) and Porque é que mostramos as horas da luz e da escuridão no mesmo círculo? [Tentativa] (Why Do We Show the Hours of Light and Darkness in the Same Circle? [Attempt], 2024). In 2025, she was the IDFA Guest of Honour, where her latest film, Fordlândia Panacea, premiered. In 2012, she founded a women’s collective that directed Doclisboa for two editions, creating new sections including Urgent Cinema and Passages (Documentary & Contemporary Art). She is a professor in the Department of Multimedia Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon.

Special Session
Fordlandia Malaise 

2019 | Portugal | 40 min

14:OCT 14h00—14h40 
Batalha Centro de Cinema

Fordlandia Malaise is a film about the memory and the present of Fordlandia, the company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rain forest in 1928. His aim was to break the British rubber monopoly and produce this material in Brazil for his car production in the United States. Today, the remains of construction testify to the scale of the failure of this neocolonialist endeavor that lasted less then a decade.

Nowadays, Fordlandia is a space suspended between times (20th and 21st centuries), between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: architectural buildings of steel, glass and masonry still remain in use while traces of indigenous life left no marks on the ground.

Although Fordlandia is well-known due to the short lasting Fordian period, one must not forget the history either before or after.

Listening to the inhabitants who claim the right to write their own story and reject the ghost town label, Fordlandia Malaise blends together archive imagery, drone footage, tales and narratives, myths and songs.

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Masterclass
At the Edge of the Visible and the Audible

14:OCT 15h15—16h00 45'
Batalha Centro de Cinema

Drawing on Susana de Sousa Dias’ work with archive images, this masterclass reflects on cinematic forms capable of interrogating, displacing, and dismantling the regimes of visibility embedded within them.

From hidden, restricted, or forgotten archives, we have moved into a present shaped by continuous exposure, accelerated circulation, and the proliferation of images whose origins and authenticity have become increasingly unstable. Through films such as 48 and Fordlandia Malaise, the session will examine different approaches to working with archival images and testimonies, seeking to reveal not only what they show, but also what they conceal, exclude, or leave at the limits of the visible and the audible.

It is within this terrain that artificial intelligence introduces a new tension. What happens when a technology designed to repair, complete and render everything visible enters a field in which imperfections and absence constitute the historical and political substance of images and sounds?

Masterclass Registration