About
Santarém International Film Festival
The Santarém International Film Festival (FICS) was born in 1971, the result of the desire of several film enthusiasts to bring the best national and international films to the city, giving an important and necessary boost to the cultural life of the region. Until 1989, FICS presented a program of works with great artistic quality that explored agricultural, rural and environmental themes.
More than thirty years later, and now in the 21st century, we are experiencing a moment of profound environmental crisis on a global scale. FICS is re-emerging with renewed vigor, but maintaining its initial core, continuing to build a space for dialogue between farmers, researchers, environmentalists, scientists, filmmakers and artists.
FICS therefore aims to be a Festival that takes responsibility for environmental, economic and social issues, doing its part to help future generations have a place to live (and watch films). We want to bring transformative energy to the city of Santarém through the decentralization of access to culture, participatory citizenship, art-based and community-based education, ecological sustainability, and the enhancement of the local area.
A FESTIVAL OF THE EARTH, BY THE EARTH
History
The Santarém Internacional Film Festival (FICS) was born in 1971, the result of the desire of several cinema lovers to bring the best national and international films to the city, giving an important and necessary boost to the region's cultural life. Throughout the various editions, it presented a program of works with great artistic quality that explored agricultural, rural and environmental themes.
From 1971 to 1989, films from all over the world were shown and FICS became a landmark in the national cultural panorama, being one of the first international film festivals in Portugal.
In 2023, the Santarém Cineclube, in partnership with the Santarém City Council, gave new life to the Festival, reactivating it, after 34 years. The 16th edition -which marked the beginning of the new chapter for the Festival -took place between the 24th and 28th of May at Teatro Sá da Bandeira, where more than 1000 spectators attended and where 36 films from 19 countries were screened, with the presence of renowned figures from national and international cinema.
The Festival
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 is a place where the complexity of the world is explored through cinema. Work, nature, industry, environmental preservation, climate change, traditions, rurality, what remains and what changes, the gestures of the earth on the big screen.
The Festival has a free approach to these representations, embracing the most diverse artistic and formal approaches such as fiction, documentary, animation or experimental cinema.
We believe that a film festival is a plural body, made up of dialogues and meetings between films and the public. This transformative energy will spread throughout the city of Santarém, in work dedicated to the decentralization of access to culture, participatory citizenship, teaching through art and in community, sustainable action and the valorization of the territory.
Values
- Show, support and promote independent cinema production nationally and internationally.
- Reach different audiences with new cinematographic proposals, in different formats.
- Promote the decentralization of cinema exhibition and access to culture in Portugal.
- Promote education and training through cinema, through activities organized in school and family contexts.
- Promote an accessible, inclusive and sustainable festival.
- Create actions that contribute to the appreciation of the region' s traditions and heritage, promoting regional tourist, gastronomic and agricultural resources, as a basis for stimulating a local and sustainable economy.