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Maybe it’s true that sophisticated cinema has perished, as Hollywood alpha-males Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese recently opined If so, this year’s Doclisboa film festival – at which over two hundred films were distributed across ten days and four central Lisbon theatres – must have been a gathering of the undead The niche pictures on show might be financially underpowered compared to the silver screen behemoths mourned by Scott and Scorsese But were intensity of interest an accepted measure of relevance, the absorbed focus given to these more obscure works could rebuke any claim of film’s plight   In central Canada, where I grew up, finding curious documentaries meant spending hours searching VHS tapes at the local library So it feels significant, when nearly every seat in a grand old theatre is occupied for a documentary on Joseph Beuys, or when droves turn out for a film about a little-known philosopher who spent her time transcribing Rimbaud’s letters Granted, Edmund Cordeiro’s Todas as Cartas de Rimbaud (All Rimbaud’s Letters) (2017) enjoyed a hometown advantage – ‘it’s our Portuguese film,’ said the woman who scanned my press pass, with a cordial pride that melted my adopted Berlin chill Cordeiro’s subject is Maria Filomena Molder, a professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa As the camera follows Molder’s transcribed pages, she moves from Rimbaud through Wittgenstein and Kant, expounding beauty and the sublime The film is less a stringent philosophy lecture than a portrait of thought unfolding in one mind, and as it does, opening the world   Throughout Doclisboa, worlds opened in many dimensions – psychological, social, geographical – prompted by a miscellany of circumstances, and with wildly varying consequences A retrospective of the late Czech director Věra Chytilová formed a kind of festival within the festival, with thirty-three of her works distributed throughout the ten days In a straightforward, news television style, Where Are You Going, Girls? (1993)  recorded female Czech entrepreneurs explaining their work, and the effect of capitalism – newly arrived by way of the Velvet Revolution – on happiness Generally, their enjoyment of autonomy beats out the stress of free