Press Club Brussels Europe #WeLoveBrussels | Page 27

Several film directors reveal their narratives with an
aesthetic value, in a competitive exhibition, awarded
with the prize Jean Loup Passek, highlighting topics
such as identity, memory and the border. It is a way
to promote social and ethnographic film, as well as
to foster tolerance and question the geographical
limits imposed to human beings. Thus, the festival’s
third edition has selected a variety of perspectives,
not only from political and social films, but also from
poetic essays and autobiographical narratives, that
explore and question memory.
Perhaps because Portugal has always been (and
still is) a country of emigrants, its relationship with
space, borders and memory is of particular relevance
to the country’s identity and, especially, to Melgaço’s region. Cinema has always been an important
medium of expression, allowing Diaspora’s communities to share their identity, representing the feeling of displacement of globally dispersed families,
their uprooting and stigmatization, when trying to
establish themselves in new locations.

Migration and identity processes in cinematic
representation, will be a matter for questioning
and reflection in the Summer Seminar “Off Screen”.
A multidisciplinary debate will be stimulated and
artistic, technological, social and human sciences
perspectives in films will be brought together.
Albeit talking of memories, we did not want to
stay in the past. In FILMES DO HOMEM - Melgaço
International Documentary Film Festival, we look
for stories of the present time domain representing life experience and identities, pursuing, with
this thinking, to look towards the future. n

To prevent these fragments of history from disappearing, it is important to find and record these stories,
creating an audiovisual archive made of still and
moving images. Through artist residencies addressed
to young creators, the municipality has been building
a collection. In the festival’s two previous editions,
documentary films and photographs were already
displayed. In 2016, young artists will be received,
once more, to continue representing local memories.

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