INTRODUCTION
FAMILY FILM PROJECT
Archive, Memory, Ethnography
International Film Festival
Created in 2012, the Family Film Project is an international film festival which takes place annually in Porto, Portugal.
The competitive programming sessions are traditionally divided into three main thematic areas: Lives and Places (focusing on the aesthetic approach of habitats, biographies and everyday life), Memory and Archive (dedicated to temporality and the poetic appropriation of testimonies and found footage) and Connections (centered on relational, interpersonal and intercultural dynamics). There are also competitive sessions dedicated to fiction and animation.
The festival welcomes films of different types and genres in its competition section, from documentary to experimental, from short films to feature films. Whether through ethnographic cinema, archival or found-footage cinema, “home movies”, the various forms of experimental cinema or the hybridization between cinema and the performing arts, the Family Film Project seeks to highlight the challenges of cinema in its testimonial and artistic double facet.
The festival program always reserves a prominent space for internationally renowned film theorists, directors and invited artists, such as Jonas Mekas (2012), Péter Forgács (2013), Alina Marazzi (2015), João Canijo (2016), Regina Guimarães (2017), Bill Nichols (2018), Daniel Blaufuks (2018), Jaimie Baron (2019), Cláudia Varejão (2019), Harun Farocki (2020), Ruben Östlund (2021), Catarina Alves Costa (2022), Naomi Kawase (2023), among many others.
With different lines of action, the festival places itself on the conceptual thresholds between cinema and other arts and areas of thought. In addition to film screenings, the Family Film Project organizes various parallel cultural events: exhibitions and installations (which may extend beyond the festival date), film concerts, performances in different locations around the city (Private Collection), masterclasses, conferences and book releases focused on the aesthetic and anthropological dimension of cinema.