Utopia Film Festival celebrates a decade as the showcase for Portuguese spoken film in the UK. This year, the festival has partnered with the University of Edinburgh and MotelX for an exclusive event at Summerhall.

Two film adaptations of stories by major writer J. G. Ballard

This double bill screening will be followed by a Q&A with the films’ director SOLVEIG NORDLUND

Low Flying Aircraft (12A*)
Portugal 2002 80min

In the near future, the human race is facing extinction. For some reason, women can no longer get pregnant. The few who achieve it only generate mutants that are immediately eliminated by the authorities. Judite Foster is fertile: she has been pregnant six times. Each time, the mandatory pregnancy tests showed that Judite was carrying a mutant and she was forced to abort. Now that she is pregnant again, she decides to run away to an abandoned hotel with her husband André. This film was shot in a famous Portuguese tourist resort, Tróia which soon after was demolished, a ghostly memory preserved. 

Journey to Orion (12A*)
Sweden 1986 17min

Solveig Nordlund’s take on J.G. Ballard’s Thirteen to Centaurus, which won a prize at the Bilbao Festival and was entirely shot aboard a ferry travelling between Stockholm and Helsinki.

SOLVEIG NORDLUND was born in Stockholm, but has lived and worked between Sweden and Portugal. Nordlund works in film and television, but also the theatre, where she has worked as a producer and director. She studied Art and Languages at the University of Stockholm and Film Studies in Paris and began her career working in films by Manoel de Oliveira, Alberto Seixas Santos and João César Monteiro. She proceeded on directing documentaries and fiction films for cinema and for Portuguese and Swedish television, and has under her belt short and feature films presented and awarded in Locarno, Rome, Mar del Plata, Rotterdam, Montréal, São Paulo, New York and Stockholm, among many other festivals.

The festival, supported by Instituto Camões, runs between 30 Nov and 9 Dec in various locations in London.