With «In the Land of Others», Porto/Post/Doc brings «The Movement of People» to a close, concluding a trilogy launched in 2024 and dedicated to human displacement, forms of belonging, and the tensions between territory, identity, and memory.

This third and final chapter begins with a question as simple as it is difficult: what does it mean to live in a place that never fully recognises us? The land of others may be a foreign country, a border to cross, a language that excludes, a community whose face is changing, an unfulfilled political promise, or even a home in which one remains subject to the gaze reserved for an intruder. In the five films brought together here, displacement is not only geographical: it is also intimate, historical, social, and symbolic.

From «Io Capitano» to «Unwelcomed», the programme follows bodies in transit, driven by inequality, political violence, and the desire for a future. In «All Good Countrymen», estrangement takes root within one’s own land, as a rural community ceases to recognise itself under the weight of a new ideological order. In «I Am Cuba», a country is filmed through a foreign gaze that transforms revolution, poverty, and emancipation into a visual experience of extraordinary power, traversed by unavoidable political tensions. In «The Double Life of Véronique», otherness moves inward, into identity itself, as if every life carried the secret memory of another possible life.

Moving between documentary, fiction, historical chronicle, political cinema, and metaphysical fable, «In the Land of Others» examines belonging as an unstable and continuously negotiated condition. To belong means learning codes, negotiating one’s place, enduring suspicion, and crossing visible and invisible borders. It also means recognising that no territory is neutral: each holds histories of possession and dispossession, inclusion and exclusion, desire and conflict.

By bringing the trilogy to a close, the programme broadens the idea of contemporary displacement. This is not only about leaving or arriving, but about understanding what happens when someone tries to build a life in a space conceived by others and governed by rules that predate and often exclude them. In these films, inhabiting the land of others means confronting the distance between the promise of belonging and the reality of an acceptance that is never complete.

IN THE LAND OF OTHERS

The Double Life of Véronique
Krzysztof Kieślowski
FRA, POL, NOR, 1991, FIC, 97’
Trailer

Io Capitano
Matteo Garrone
ITA, BEL, FRA, 2023, FIC, 121’
Trailer

All Good Countrymen
Vojtěch Jasný
CZE, 1968, FIC, 114’
Trailer

Unwelcomed
Sebastián González, Amílcar Infante
CHL, 2025, DOC, 70’
Trailer

I Am Cuba
Mikhail Kalatozov
CUB, SUN, 1964, FIC, 140’
Trailer