Porto/Post/Doc: Film & Media Festival is a cinema of the real festival that will take place in Porto from November 27 to December 3, 2017. As a meeting point for creators, audience and industry professionals, Porto/Post/Doc aims to foster film culture, screening new forms of contemporary cinema. With an eclectic philosophy, ranging from the International Competition and parallel programmes (such as Transmission, for documentaries about music and night parties; or the Forum of the Real, with debates with specialists and academics), the festival will occupy four venues of Porto (Teatro Municipal do Porto - Rivoli, Cinema Passos Manuel, Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto e Maus Hábitos - Espaço de Intervenção Cultural), a historic and cosmopolitan city, the centre of a vibrant community and nightlife.
Memory is a central aspect of cinema. It is by moving images that we remember past events, as if cinema could be an archive of time. That is why we decided to dedicate the theme of Porto/Post/Doc to the Archive, because the cinema itself is a kind of archive of human memory. Our programme includes films that use archival images, but also old movies that allow our memory to find other worlds and other emotions. In this context, we present several focus: Jean Rouch (the mythical French author, of whom we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth); the Czech Miroslav Janek (a filmmaker who seeks, in school communities, to give visibility to those who are despised); and Peter Mettler (author of a work in which cinema reflects time and human contradictions). As a key point of our programme, we will explore the concept of post-memory. This focus, which includes a cinema programme and the Forum of the Real, is made in partnership with the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. Its purpose is to show the use of the archive as a means of producing new documentary narratives and for the preponderance of this method to interrogate the history of the twentieth century.
The festival will also celebrate memory with different time capsules: films in various programmes that use archival images or promote, through fiction, the reconstruction of history.
In 2017, we foster our educational project, School Trip: numerous sessions for schools, for different age groups and young audiences, allowing the discovery of cinema in the room and stimulating the creation of a curious and active public. For us, cinema is also a means to form better citizens. As a great novelty, Porto/Post/Doc presents the Highlights programme. In all the sessions of the night, in the Manoel de Oliveira Auditorium, Rivoli, we screen new films, of essential authors of contemporary cinema or with subjects that are fundamental of our world. In these sessions, almost all in Portuguese premiere, we try to take the cinema to a wider audience and promote the debate. From Al Gore to Sofia Coppola, through fashion designer Dries Van Noten and singer Grace Jones, these films mark our time. These are real stories.
A film festival is both a place of the future - showcasing new films - as well as a window into a past that needs to be rediscovered. A window to all the memory of the world. The memory that is revealed and which is, at any moment, being created. Follow us on this journey through the cinema of the real.
