Partycrashers is an on-going series of video dispatches from critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young.
The stars align! Eventually: though we’ve notched up 40 film festivals between us this year (16 for me, contrary to the miscount offered in the video below), the fourth edition of Porto/Post/Doc was only the third we’d attended together—and the first proper opportunity to record a dispatch of this kind. As parties go, this one was easy to crash: ostensibly an event dedicated to nonfiction, Post/Doc, held in beautifully distinctive Porto, was also open to feature films such as The Beguiled, Lucky, and 120 BPM, as well as more or less more straightforward documentaries like Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s An Inconvenient Sequel and Sophie Fiennes’ Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami.
The primary source of interest for us, however, was the festival’s main bulk: its competition, including Gürcan Keltek’s prize-winner Meteors, Adirley Queirós’ Once There Was Brazilia, Anna Eborn’s Lida and Tiziana Panizza’s Tierra Sola—in addition to repertory highlights from Peter Mettler and Miroslav Janek. Framed by a discussion of what might be meant by a term like ‘post-doc,’ Neil and I plow this rich soil with limited means—even past the point where, quite unbeknownst to us, technical facilities fail us. —Michael Pattison