Batalha — Centro de Cinema, in Porto, will host a meeting next week that wants to get professionals from the sector to talk and draw conclusions about “the practice of cinema today in Portugal”.
“That is what we want to find out, basically, what is happening in the sector?”, said the artistic director of Batalha, Guilherme Blanc, in statements to the Lusa agency, regarding the “New Meetings of Portuguese Cinema”, which are taking place Tuesday and Wednesday.
This initiative is promoted in partnership with the Clube Português de Cinematografia — Cineclube do Porto and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and occurs 56 years after a similar initiative carried out in Batalha, at the end of 1967.
At that time, the “New Portuguese Cinema Week” had the objective of discussing the economic and technical problems facing cinema and ended up giving rise, years later, to the creation of the Portuguese Cinema Center and new legislation for the sector.
More than half a century later, Guilherme Blanc affirms that the promoters of the new meetings are only “interlocutors or mediators”, “causing a meeting from which questions can be raised and a ‘state of the art’ on the sector and the practice of it.” cinema today in Portugal”.
The artistic director reinforces a point that he considers important in these meetings: That people meet and talk to each other.
“People don’t meet and cinema is also a very broad field, right? In fact, it is enough to see that we are bringing education, people who have no experience in cinema, who treat cinema from a pedagogical point of view, for example, and people who work in cinema actively in the field, as producers, “he said. saying.
At the invitation of the organization, four commissioners, researchers and specialists in the field of cinema will present conclusions from several months of work and will moderate round tables around four axes: Education (with Carlos Natálio), Production (with Mariana Liz), Criticism (with José Bértolo) and Distribution and Exhibition (with Paulo Cunha).
Representatives of associations of producers, directors, screenwriters, film festivals and film clubs, people who work to promote film literacy and media criticism will participate in the debates.
The debate program does not have the presence of any representative of the Ministry of Culture or the Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual, for example, but the artistic director of Batalha said that invitations were made to be present, in addition to the more than one hundred participants already confirmed to view
“It’s a broader conversation, it’s a conversation about the independent sector. It is an informative conversation of policies, perspectives and practices and conditions. It is the voice of the non-institutional sector,” he said.
And there is another aspect that the organizers “definitely” want to emerge: “A set of conclusions, but we cannot foresee them. It is a meeting of synthesis, inquiry and study. That people can investigate these conclusions that we don’t know what they are either, ”he said.
Source: Observadora
