Short films before Curtas
Why did we found a short film festival more than 30 years ago? I don't think anyone knows anymore, it was a somewhat unconscious choice at a time when short films weren't even part of the current vocabulary. But I believe that the films we had seen in the more or less recent past must have played an important role. I took advantage of the motto launched by Porto/Post/Doc to revisit what would be my personal short film canon before we held a festival dedicated to short films. An exercise in memory where there must be some flaws. But unlike some films I saw two years ago, there are some short films that I know exactly where and under what circumstances they were seen, because they were rare. First of all, the first film I saw at the cinema was a short, Le ballon rouge, by Albert Lamorisse, at a Christmas screening at the company where my parents worked. Or the films on Vasco Granja's ‘Animação’ programme, from Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to Norman McLaren. RTP2 TV Channel, could surprise you with works such as Samuel Beckett's Film or Pasolini's La Ricotta. The screenings at Cineclube do Norte, where I saw Resnais' Night and Fog and Pasolini's La sequenza del fiore di carta again with some of my future festival colleagues at the same screening. Of all these, two films I watched at Figueira da Foz film festival in different years, were included in the programme at Porto/Post/Doc: Jean Vigo's Zero de conduite, which I remember, if memory serves, as part of a choice by Manoel de Oliveira, and En rachâchant, by Straub and Huillet, presented in the short film competition, which I think won a prize. It was just a coincidence, but I now realise that both are examples of debate and resistance, within the school, to any manifestation of authority: in Straub-Huillet's film, based on a children's book by Marguerite Duras, a boy refuses to go to school because he is being taught things he doesn't know; Jean Vigo's film, banned in France for almost two decades, after it was made, portrays a group of students from a strict boarding school who rebel against the institution, and the film is still considered today to be one of the most daring acts of rebellion in the history of cinema. (Miguel Dias)

Zero For Conduct, an essential film by Jean Vigo that unpicks archetypes about childhood and explores confrontations with authority. The film evokes Vigo's own childhood, his time at boarding school, the absence of his father while he was in prision, and the growing pains of those early years. A film banned by French censorship between 1932 and 1946, Zero in Conduct evokes the human incapacity to deal with the violence of the system.