Santarém International Film Festival (FICS) was founded in 1971, the result of the will of several cinema lovers to bring the best national and international films to the city, giving an important and necessary impulse to the cultural life of the region. Throughout the various editions, the festival presented a programme of great artistic quality that explored the agricultural, rural, and environmental themes.

From 1971 to 1989, films from all over the world were screened in Santarém and FICS became a landmark in the national cultural panorama, being one of the first film festivals of an international dimension in Portugal.

After a pause of three decades, the Cineclube de Santarém decided to give the Festival a new life and to resume the course traced out in these decades. With a new breath, FICS will return in 2023 for its 16th edition.

The relationship between human beings and their environment, in their interaction with the natural world, is one of the great themes of our time. How is this relationship represented in cinema? What images are created and what questions arise? What pasts exist and what futures do we imagine? FICS intends to create a space where the complexity of the world is explored through cinema. Labour, nature, industry, environmental preservation, climate change, traditions, rurality, what remains and what changes, the gestures of the earth on the big screen.

FICS has a free approach to these representations, embracing the most diverse artistic and formal approaches such as fiction, documentary, animation or experimental cinema.

A film festival is a plural body, made of dialogues and encounters between the films and the audience. This transformative energy will spread throughout the city of Santarém, in a work dedicated to decentralizing access to culture, to participatory citizenship, to education through art and in community, to sustainable action and to valuing the territory.

Screen, support and promote the production of independent cinema at a national and international level.

Promote the decentralization of cinema exhibition and access to culture in Portugal.

Promote education through cinema through activities organized in school and family contexts.

Promote an accessible, inclusive and sustainable festival.

Create actions that contribute to the valorization of the traditions and heritage of the region, promoting regional tourist, gastronomic and agricultural resources, as a stimulus base for a local and sustainable economy.