In a year in which the world is looking at the United States, the festival presents, as a national premiere, two films that propose a reflection around recent American history, in the Highlights section.
Thus, on November 20th, at 7pm, at the opening ceremony, the Port/Post/Doc will exhibit David Byrne's American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee. The film presents the live show with the same name, which was presented by the former Talking Heads vocalist on Broadway earlier this year. In the live performance, the musician interprets the album American Utopia presenting some modifications and variations to the themes and giving the concert a political inspiration. David Byrne's American Utopia performance is repeated on November 27th at 2:30pm.
At the closing ceremony, also on November 28th at 7pm, the festival will screen MLK/FBI, a documentary directed by Sam Pollard and a film extremely relevant from a historical point of view. MLK/FBI performs the vital task of analysing the relentless campaign of surveillance and harassment that J. Edgar Hoover promoted against Martin Luther King, Jr. Today Martin Luther King is celebrated by various political specters as a moral hero but it will not be in vain to recall the years when US agents treated him as a villain. Inspired by the work of historian David Garrow, the film uses recently declassified files to study the FBI's motivations and methods in that campaign. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the black community began to mobilize to combat racial discrimination, Hoover saw the movement as a communist conspiracy. Instead of supporting equality, the FBI sought to undermine the King through phone tapping and blackmail at a stage that former FBI director James Comey considered "the darkest part of FBI history".