When Film Was Freedom: Portugal’s Art Rebels Return to the Screen
The Cinemateca Portuguesa digs up the 60s and 70s avant-garde — when artists like Ana Hatherly and Julião Sarmento turned their cameras on life, politics, and each other.
Lisbon’s Cinemateca Portuguesa is cracking open a lost archive — a reel of rebellion. Starting this month and running through 2026, the institution is screening “Cinema Experimental Português: O Cinema dos Artistas, anos 60 e 70,” a deep dive into the era when Portugal’s visual artists decided to make films that didn’t ask for permission.
The lineup reads like a who’s who of post-dictatorship creativity: Ana Hatherly, Julião Sarmento, Lourdes Castro, Helena Almeida, Noronha da Costa, António Palolo, and Carlos Calvet, among others. They weren’t filmmakers in the traditional sense. They were painters, poets, performance artists — using 8mm and Super8 cameras to capture the world as it shifted beneath them.
Hatherly’s Revolução (1975) is the beating heart of the program: a restless portrait of Lisbon’s walls after April 25, when graffiti became the people’s newspaper. Helena Almeida painted herself into existence, literally. Julião Sarmento filmed desire as something fragile and unspoken. And Carlos Calvet’s Momentos na vida do poeta (1964) immortalized Mário Cesariny in tender, flickering motion — friendship as artistic manifesto.
This wasn’t cinema as industry. It was cinema as intimacy. A “cinema livre,” made in kitchens, studios, and streets, long before “DIY” became a brand. The camera was a confidant, documenting exhibitions, performances, and daily life with poetic urgency.
On November 19, the legendary Silvestre Pestana — poet, performance artist, and one of the first in Portugal to fuse poetry with video and electronic media — will appear in person. Pestana’s “video-poems” from the 1970s and 80s feel eerily current: coded, chaotic, and charged with political voltage.
The Cinemateca’s painstaking restoration work gives these ghosts new light. What emerges is not nostalgia but resistance — proof that Portugal’s experimental cinema wasn’t a footnote; it was a quiet revolution on film.
“Cinema Experimental Português: O Cinema dos Artistas, anos 60 e 70” runs through 2026 at the Cinemateca Portuguesa, Lisbon.
