If Cinema Noir brought a new visual style to stories of crime, passion and suspense in the 1940s and 1950s, in the 1970s the genre reinvented itself with more violent, ambiguous and sombre narratives. Although the French wave had already flirted with a new type of Noir, it was in the USA that the Neo-noir subgenre expanded as a new cinema trend, driven by figures such as Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader. From then on, in different cultural contexts (especially in American, European and Asian cinema), films whose visuals were anchored in hyper-stylised aesthetics, with pulsating colours, shed a different light on the enigmatic artificiality of cinema, the night and urbanity: descendants of Noir, simultaneously Neo and Neon.
The programme, guided by this light, invites you to immerse yourself in the aesthetic, technological and emotional landscape of this subgenre, in which contrasts — between the past and the future, darkness and light, alienation and desire — coexist in universes where truth is illusory and morality relative. This type of narrative and visual environment has been cyclically reinterpreted, and has had a particularly prolific moment in the last decade with authors such as Nicolas Winding Refn, Julia Ducournau, the Safdie brothers or Diao Yi'Nan (the latter included in the programme).
Starting not in the USA but on the fringes of the French Cinema du Look, without forgetting the Portuguese context of the same period, Neo/n Noir brings together films that mirror.