Alice

Months have passed since Mario's daughter Alice disappeared, and he still walks the same route every day. He has installed cameras along the streets the two of them crossed that morning, and every evening he watches the tapes back one by one. This is not hope; it is a system, and his life has frozen around the repetition. Marco Martins's first feature shows Lisbon as empty, grey and closely watched. Nuno Lopes plays it without ever raising his voice. It screened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and came back with a prize. What it is really about is not the loss but the ritual built around it, because giving up the search would itself be a form of accepting what happened.