Intervention Cinema: 50 Years Later

24 June, 18h30 > Opening session, Salão de Festas d’A Voz do Operário

25–26 June, 15h30–23h > Screenings and debates, Casa do Comum

This programme marks the 50th anniversary of the Mostra Internacional de Cinema de Intervenção, a nine-day encounter held in Estoril, in May 1976, that brought together over 150 politically committed films from across the Global South and North. Largely forgotten today, the Mostra was an ambitious, openly militant project uniting leftist struggles of the world through their cinema, thereby interrelating solidarity networks of antifascist, anti-racist, workers and feminist struggles in Europe with anticolonial and anti-imperial ones worldwide. The question of cinema was inseparable from both collectivity and political imagination, from the practices of watching, making and thinking together through images. Over three days, we would like to open a series of questions on cinema’s capacity to intervene in political reality today, and on the infrastructures, old and new, through which it might still produce forms of collectivity and mobilisation.

Programme

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

18h30 [Talk + screening] OPENING SESSION

Introduction to the programme and screening of the film My Heart Beats Only For Her, Mohamed Soueid (2008, Lebanon, 86’).

My Heart Beats Only For Her follows Hassan writing a letter to his father Abu Hassan Hanoi (nom de guerre), seeking to grasp his revolutionary period in the Fatah movement from Lebanon to Hanoi to Dubai. In the long 1960s, calls to turn every Arab capital into Hanoi for the Palestinian Revolution were widespread. [Spoken in Arabic, English, and Vietnamese, with English subtitles.]

25 June — Casa do Comum, Lisbon

15h30 [Screening] CINEMA AGAINST FASCISM (1936-1938)

Screening of Ciné-Archives: Films of the Popular Front (Ciné-Archives : Films du Front Populaire, 2026, France, 55’), followed by a debate.

A montage of archival films made between 1936 and 1938, in the context of the French Popular Front, the left-wing coalition that came to power in France in the face of fascism’s advance across Europe. The editing was made this year by Ciné-Archives, the Audiovisual collection of the French Communist Party and the workers’ movement, where the films are preserved.

18h00 [Roundtable] WATCHING POLITICAL FILMS TOGETHER TODAY

Roundtable with Cinema na Mula, Cinema Fulgor, Cineclube da Linha de Sintra [in Portuguese].

21h30 [Screening] INTER-SESSIONS. FILMIC INTERRUPTIONS THEN AND NOW

Programme composed of Ciné-Tract 23 (anonymous, 1968, France, 3′); Now! (Santiago Álvarez, 1965, Cuba, 6’); and Video Tracts for Palestine (anonymous, 2026, 43′, new cut), followed by a debate.

26 June — Casa do Comum, Lisbon

15h30 [Screening and talk] IBERIAN CONNECTIONS: COOPERATIVISM, REPRESSION, AND CLANDESTINE FILMS

Screening of Spanish short films by the Colectivo de Cine de Madrid, that were anonimously shown at the Mostra in 1976, such as: Luchas Obreras, Universidad 71-72, Solidaridad con los presos españoles, Vitoria marzo 1976, followed by a talk with Alejandro Alvarado (filmmaker, researcher) and Ana Algarra (historian, researcher).

18h00 [Screening and talk] NOT A PENNY ON THE RENTS

Screening of short film Not a Penny on the Rents by the collective Cinema Action (1969, UK, 22 min.), followed by a talk with the new Sindicato de Moradores de Lisboa (Renters Union) [in Portuguese].

21h00 [Screening and final debate] CLOSING SESSION

Screening of Barronhos: Quem Teve Medo do Poder Popular? by Luís Filipe Rocha (1976, Portugal, 53’), followed by an open debate.

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.

Organised by: Doc’s Kingdom, in close collaboration with Philip Widmann, Raquel Schefer, Alejandro Alvarado, Ana Algarra.

Co-organised by: IFILNOVA/CineLab, in the framework of The Ongoing Seminar.

Partners: Casa do Comum, A Voz do Operário.

Free entry, no registration required (subject to room capacity).