CineEco celebrates 30th edition with cinema, pedagogical and training actions, chats and exhibitions
October 10th to 18th, Seia
The Serra da Estrela International Environmental Film Festival maintains a memory relationship with Portuguese cinema through its programming of classics. In the 30th edition, which takes place between October 10th and 18th, the festival will show, in a double session, two films recently digitized by Cinemateca Portuguesa – Trás-os-Montes and Cerromaior.
The program called Echoes of the Mountain and the Plain allows us to review and interpret unique works of Portuguese cinema in the way they look at two large and broad territories, Trás-os-Montes and Alentejo, which still preserve a strong environmental, rural and social identity today. , which deserves to be valued in the face of new problems, challenges and opportunities.
Trás-os-Montes, which will be shown on October 13th, at 4 pm, is a documentary with vivid ethnographic elements, created and written, in 1976, by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro. The cast brings together non-professional actors, inhabitants of Bragança and Miranda do Douro, who play fictional characters, typical of Terra Fria. The film is a declaration of love for the territory, identifies centuries-old habits in an imposing rural environment, and is worth seeing when the region faces the landscape and environmental challenges of lithium mining.
Cerromaior, showing on October 17th, at 4 pm, with the presence of director Luís Filipe Rocha, based on the novel of the same name by Manuel da Fonseca, published in 1943. The film, shot during the summer of 1979, in the village of Portel, in Alentejo, also included the active participation of the village population and the region’s peasants, dramatizing the reality of Alentejo society at the end of the 1930s, in the context of the deeply unequal relationship between rural workers and landowners when the Estado Novo was in the process of consolidation. It is a work that awakens our contemporary perspective on a region where agrarian reform took place and which is currently investing, once again, in agricultural production under an intensive monoculture regime.
This double session also allows us to celebrate the 50th anniversary of April 25, 1974, through two film productions shot, produced and premiered in full democracy.
In parallel activities, CineEco 2024 presents the main novelty of Meetings in the Market, a meeting and networking space between students and players in the Brazilian film market. The festival organizers invited the country’s film and audiovisual schools to have their students present in this one-day initiative, an opportunity for these young people to pitch a project (feature or short film, series, etc.). and present a short film already made, linked to environmental themes. With a primarily pedagogical and training approach, the idea of these Market Meetings is to provide professional experiences to students that guarantee them additional skills for their future in the world of work. Players (producers, executive producers, exhibitors, distributors, etc.) are invited to give advice to students to create work opportunities and/or finance their projects and, at the same time, look at the work of emerging creative values.
For the second year, and after the success of the last edition, Conversas no Jardim da Biblioteca Municipal de Seia on environmental cinema is another of the program’s highlights. Directors, producers, technicians, actors, teachers, programmers and judges are invited to talk about their experience and/or vision of cinema, and how artistic and cinematographic value has an impact on raising awareness about the environmental cause. The public is a fundamental part of this interaction and is always welcome to ask questions related to the festival, cinema and the environment.
About exhibitions, this year a new film exhibition space with a more artistic format, but no less important, is presented, Videoarte. Of the many conceptual films that enter the competition every year, this edition creates a showcase of films that, due to their more poetic scope and dynamic repeat projection, go beyond the purely cinematic line and are presented in a gallery format. These are video art notes, which, by bringing together moving images and plastic art, provide a different way of exercising the look, because you have the tool of loop available.
From October 10th to November 30th, CineEco will also feature three more exhibitions at the Municipal House of Culture.
Estado da Água presents six artistic proposals, developed in the village of Sabugueiro and the surrounding territory of Serra da Estrela, in the context of a program of artistic residencies carried out with financial support from DGArtes. The focus of the project is the interpretation of the presence of water in the landscape based on approaches that express the diversity of artistic visions felt by Eunice Artur, Iana Ferreira, Inês Teles, Joana Patrão, Jorge Leal and Thierry Ferreira.
In Plastic Bitch, Cláudia Clemente reflects on the current situation of rampant consumerism, extreme pollution, depletion of natural resources and exacerbated waste production. The artist seeks to awaken awareness and (self) critical judgment of the uncomfortable mirror, which reflects what, as a society, we have become: plastic bitches.
In-Line, by Clo Bourgard, there is also an appeal to sustainability, represented by the use of discarded materials, which are discarded or which lose their original usefulness, as the main raw material. The Line project involves three artistic installations: White Line, an ode to the earth in the shape of a mountain; Green Line, a community interaction facility; and Mountain Line, built with natural resources collected on site that will be on display at the CineEco festival.
