About
Santarém International Film Festival
Cinema, testimony and memory of the 20th century, is a free body in constant dialogue with the desire for freedom, creation and innovation, having always been an important point for imagining possible futures. The relationship between human beings and their environment is one of the important themes of our time and permeates many of the gestures we see on the big screen since the beginnings of the seventh art.
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.