50 Years After: Revisiting the Mostra Internacional de Cinema de Intervenção (Estoril, 1976)

24, 25 e 26 de junho

A Voz do Operário

Casa do Comum

This programme marks the 50th anniversary of the MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA DE INTERVENÇÃO, a nine-day gathering held in Estoril in May 1976, which brought together more than 150 politically committed films from the Global South and North. In the aftermath of the Portuguese Revolutionary Period, the Mostra was shaped by networks of solidarity linking antifascist, anticolonial, and anti-imperialist struggles across the world. It emerged from a moment in which cinema was understood as a space of circulation contributing to the articulation of anticolonial, workers’, and feminist movements. In that context, cinema was inseparable from politics and collectivity. Considering both what persists and what has changed since then until today, we seek to open a series of questions about cinema’s capacity to intervene in political reality, and about the infrastructures through which it may still produce forms of collectivity and mobilisation.

Programme

24 June — A Voz do Operário (Salão de Festas), Lisbon

19h–21h30

19h Opening screening and talk

The opening session includes a general presentation of the 1976 Mostra, drawing on archival filmed documents from the period: what the Mostra was, what can be imagined from it today, and why it remains relevant. It also includes the screening of My Heart Beats Only for Her by Mohamed Soueid (Lebanon, 2008). The film takes as its starting point the echo of the Vietnamese revolution in the Arab world — and in particular the call to transform every Arab capital into a Hanoi for the Palestinian revolution. Constructed as a letter to his father, the filmmaker Hassan travels through Beirut, Dubai, and Hanoi in search of the traces of that moment, following the biography of Hatem Hatem, known by the nom de guerre Abu Hassan Hanoi, a Fatah combatant from southern Lebanon who, after the 1982 Israeli invasion and the withdrawal of Palestinian fighters, withdrew from political life and returned to his home village. The film interrogates what remains today of the internationalist solidarities that defined the 1960s and 70s, through the entangled relations between revolution, economy, war, and urban growth across three cities.

25 June — Casa do Comum, Lisbon

15h30–19h45

15h30–17h [Screening and talk] Ciné-Archives: Films du Front Populaire (2026, 55′) — a montage drawn from the audiovisual archive of the French Communist Party and the workers’ movement, by Marion Boulestreau and Federico Lancialonga, followed by discussion

17h30–19h45 [Roundtable] Film clubs and alternative projects of distribution and exhibition of political cinema — with Cinema na Mula (Cooperativa Mula, Barreiro), Cinema Fulgor (Odemira), Cineclube da Linha de Sintra (Nêga Filmes). An open discussion on the creation of spaces for collective viewing and debate, and on the relations between film exhibition and present-day political struggles

26 June — Casa do Comum, Lisbon

15h30–23h

15h30 [Screening and talk] Iberian Resistances in the Period of Democratic Transitions — programmed by Alejandro Alvarado (filmmaker, Spain) and Ana Algarra Navarro (doctoral researcher, Universidade de Lisboa), exploring the circulation of political cinema between Portugal and Spain during the democratic transitions, including anonymous Spanish films presented at the 1976 Mostra

17h30 [Open debate] Closing discussion

21h [Screening and talk] Ciné-Tracts, Video Tracts — a previously unshown montage of Video Tracts for Palestine by Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salhab, together with a selection of historical ciné-tracts from the 1960s and 70s, interrogating the form of the “filmic pamphlet” as an interruption of the flow of images, followed by discussion

Coming soon

Stay tuned — further activities will be announced soon. For up-to-date information, please visit our website and follow IFILNOVA or Doc’s Kingdom on Instagram.

The Ongoing Seminar

The Ongoing Seminar is a series of encounters in Lisbon dedicated to critical thinking and collective reflection on the role of cinema in the present, the relationship between images and politics, and the emancipatory potential of documentary practices.

In close collaboration with: Philip Widmann, Raquel Schefer, Alejandro Alvarado and Ana Algarra.

Co-organised by IFILNOVA/CineLab and Doc’s Kingdom. Free entry, no registration required (subject to room capacity).

Partners: Casa do Comum and A Voz do Operário.