ONWARD!
70th Flaherty Film Seminar
June 26–29, 2025
Lisbon Pod
Curated collaboratively by Janaína Oliveira, Carlos A. Gutiérrez, and Richard Herskowitz
Lisbon Pod organiser: Maile Colbert (IFILNOVA)
In moments of great upheaval, can cinema provide fuel for a radical paradigm shift? What cultural momentum does the cinema offer us today? The very acts of making and watching non-fiction films are rooted deep in legacies of solidarity and resistance. How does this moment call on us to nourish those legacies and forge our own?
Onward! is a call to move through obstacles with collective action. Onward! is the call of the artist, the activist, the doula, the hopeful, the grieving – the people in the midst of painful transition. Onward! is animated both by the urgency of change, and the patience to know that liberation must come, will come. Onward! embraces the battlefield as the terrain of greater possibility. Freedom is an ongoing state of insistence that is carried forward in each act of making, questioning, resisting, remembering. Onward! is to stay the course and trust in the process of change.
Movement is not solitary. Onward! calls for collectivity, for curiosity, for entanglement, for hope, for solidarity across generations. Onward! is propelled by calls from the past, which too believed in the potency of the moment, and of all moments yet to come. Onward! celebrates coexisting and futurities.
Onward! is the irresistibility of resistance.
From June 26 to 29, people in Salaya, New Delhi, Warsaw, Porto, Lisbon, Bogotá, Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles will be able to gather daily to watch Seminar programming and participate in discussions with other local participants at official Seminar Pods.
Registrations for Pods are open now. (Spaces are limited and filling up.)
Lisbon Pod
In collaboration with The Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon (FBAUL), IPLUSO – ECIA Higher School of Communication, Innovation and Arts, and The Laboratory of Cinema and Philosophy (CineLab) of IFILNOVA, NOVA FCSH), the Lisbon Pod will present the Seminar’s film programs alongside in-depth discussions with film scholars and artists.
All programs will be presented with Portuguese subtitles.
The Seminar
The Flaherty upholds a tradition of non-preconception. The film programs are not announced in advance, but the schedule and participation details will be announced soon.
Offering an immersive program of screenings and carefully moderated conversations, the Seminar is an internationally recognized forum for field-building collective inquiry into the form and function of non-fiction cinema, encouraging the exchange of cinematic ideas across generations and cultures, and promoting the expansion of the limits of cinema itself.