BIOGRAF - International Film and Moving Arts Festival kicks off on 27 August in Vila Nova de Cerveira

agenda

DATE

22 Aug 2025

AUTHOR

Umbigo

BIOGRAF - International Film and Moving Arts Festival kicks off on 27 August in Vila Nova de Cerveira

AUTHOR

Umbigo

The first edition of BIOGRAF - International Film and Moving Arts Festival will take place at Palco das Artes in Vila Nova de Cerveira between 27 and 31 August 2025, featuring more than 55 works from 20 countries.

Promoted by ADVERSA in partnership with the Municipality of Cerveira, the festival aims to ‘reintroduce the Seventh Art — and, above all, independent and cult cinema — in Cerveira, as part of the recent local cultural development,’ explains explains the direction of BIOGRAF (Tiago Bastos Nunes, António Bernardes de Sá & Magna Araújo Amorim), in an interview with UMBIGO.

BIOGRAF was created with a clear compromise: to give the local public a collective cinematic experience, centred on the cinema room, and based on a curatorship that combines cinema, visual arts, video art and contemporary reflection, with numerous sessions and conversations open to the community. "We want this to be a project that can give something back to its community. To this end, we are presenting a mostly free programme and intend to donate half of our box office receipts to a local association," adds the organisation.

Developed under the theme “Movements” — artistic and cinematographic, political and social — the BIOGRAF´25 programme is divided into several sections that bring together some classics from the greatest masters of cinema and recent national productions. According to the festival director, putting together the programme was a challenge from the outset: ‘We are working on reintroducing cult cinema in Cerveira. We didn't want to start with the origins of the Seventh Art, but rather propose a return to more recent masterpieces and work on this adherence gradually.’

The Fotogramas section, the core of the programme, presents some works that have marked the history of modern and contemporary cinema, with emphasis on the films of Akira Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. The festival's opening session — with free admission — will feature a screening of Coppola's classic Apocalypse Now on 27 August.

Contemporary national production will be represented in the Terratreme Showcase, consisting of a selection of three short films from the catalogue of the Terratreme production company, by João Salaviza, Vasco Saltão and Pedro Peralta, which explore cultural and social issues through a distinctive authorial perspective. The Academic Showcase highlights future trends in national cinema. With films from ESTC, NOVA FCSH, IPVC, ETIC, UBI and ESMAD, produced over the last three academic years, this section seeks to promote experimentation and map artistic production within academia in Portugal.

Internationally, the Ibero-American Cycle stands out, including works by directors Glauber Rocha and Walter Salles. This section presents cinema as a historical testimony and instrument of socio-political criticism, focusing on the cultural and social transformations of Brazil and Latin America. Also in an international context, the festival is launching Frontiers, a programme developed in collaboration with OEI Portugal, which will result in the screening of the award-winning films from the Competitive Section in Ibero-America, giving filmmakers the opportunity to showcase their work beyond borders.

BIOGRAF also extends to the Bienal de Cerveira, which will host New Narratives, developed in collaboration with Canal180. Presented as a continuous programme in the Biennial's Grand Auditorium, this section revisits the impact of music videos between 2005 and 2015 — a period in which YouTube and other digital platforms replaced MTV, giving rise to a new wave of DIY works that reinvented audiovisual language. The selection features works by Vincent Moon, Brook Linder, Yoonha Park, Saman Kesh and Tom Haines, created for artists such as Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, Deerhoof, White Denim and Beach House. The selection also includes three films by Elisa Mishto & Alexandre Powelz, Katharina Pichler and David Matias & Vasco Gil, presenting an expanded perspective on visual narrative in music.

BIOGRAF also promotes critical reflection and interdisciplinary thinking through the Forum programme, a debate platform with guests from various areas of the film and creative industries. Among the participants are directors and jury members Sandro Aguilar and Mário Macedo, as well as EMMY winners Renato Marques and Nuno Bento, who will join André Constantino, correspondent for the ZA/UM studio, for a round table dedicated to new narrative languages and the intersections between cinema, video games and contemporary art.

Tickets for the Fotogramas section are available at Ticketline and Palco das Artes from 27 August. Admission is free for all other events.

You can find more information about the festival programme here.

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