In rural Portugal, the Cinema Fulgor project seeks to absorb the cycles and seasons of agricultural time, planting films like seeds to germinate and grow. In this poetic essay, filmmaker, curator and Cinema Fulgor founder Sílvia das Fadas describes the philosophies and principles which underpin this practice – calling for a communal, ecological cinema of reciprocity, reparation and regeneration.

Life has summoned us to the banks of the Mira River, and later into a forest where there are no walls or fences,¹ near the creek known as Ribeira do Torgal. The place was wild, still is. A shelter built of rammed earth and stone, with a window in the shape of a sail. The house of fulgor, where Cinema Fulgor is anticipated and curated, welcomed us from the cities and foreign countries where we lived. In it, we gathered books—nomads until then—alongside film projectors and an editing table. We recollected herbs and stones, amidst all the dust. On foot, along the side roads to Troviscais or through the woods towards the nearby bridge.

While weaving the film-in-metamorphosis² that had brought us here with a thread of rural wonder (a village life),³ it sprouted, it is still sprouting:
the desire for a cinema with mobile roots,
an incandescent cinema,
living amidst the living.

The desire was collective, still is. It began with an invitation to sow cinema from the shore to the inland border, throughout the Alentejo region, in Southern Portugal; an invitation we sent to Rossana Torres and Helena Inverno, filmmakers located between the Guadiana River and the right bank of the Ribeira de Safrino, a tributary of the Ribeira da Figueira, which flows into the Sado River. From this unexpected meeting of the diverse,⁴ we weaved together until differences, dissent and an unbalance of desire trifurcated our paths. From the clash arose reflection; from the reflection, the collective practice of a single person (woman, plural) with her ever-forming allies continues to be woven.

According to the writer Maria Gabriela Llansol, fulgor is a dazzling brightness, a rupture in time and historicity that harbors the possibility of unexpected encounters from the margins. Imbued with utopian potentiality, fulgor is mutable, nomadic and precarious. And so is cinema.

Whether they are Fulgores or Bravias,⁵ our screenings are offerings, the fruit of a thought (an ecology of attention), an artistic practice and its materialization in a constellation of sharing that is made and unmade in order to be made anew. By invoking the potency of cinema as a communal and ecological experience, woven together and nurtured through communal listening, coexistence and friction in the bio-region and beyond, in processes of becoming-with (as Donna Haraway proposes),⁶ we have long since lost the notion of time, at least linear time. We bear witness to the seasons, the equinoxes and the solstices, to village time and to agricultural time, with its works and days, sowing, harvesting, and fallow periods. 

The fact is that the rural, indigenous, peasant and eco-feminist imaginaries have been transforming us. Between the abundance of films we wish to see, curate and share, and the scarcity of material support to do so in rural areas,⁷ we persist in weaving the most ancestral of laws: the affirmation of life.

It is said that everything begins in the soil and returns to it, in the darkness, where seeds can germinate. Films are seeds, auguries. Released into the earth cyclically, month by month, in a space of hospitality provided by Cultivamos Cultura, in the village of São Luís, our so-called Fulgores are screenings of films from different cine-geographies and temporalities. Their call is one of coexistence, interspecies relations, struggles in defence of territories, indigenous cosmologies, peasant life, the transmission of narratives, rituals and the regeneration of ties with the land. Essays on the possibilities of other worlds. 

When and where you least expect it, feral projections (which we call Bravias) spring up, woven together in alliance and itinerancy:

The first at the invitation of a feminist festival: The Marias Festival, in Beja; the second and third from Montras – Mostra de Artistas e Artesãos de São Luís, both dedicated to water; the fourth, in dialogue with the Provisional School for Nothing, in Sabóia, and the Alentejo Research Unit, with barbs in the eyes and a haunting land; the fifth, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Ideia – Revista de Cultura Libertária and the anarchist imaginary, hosted by the Cineclube-Fora-dos Leões in Évora; the sixth, conjured up by Monokino/Shhh, at the Social Life of Film collective meeting: “The Sea Oracle”, silent films about the sea by the sea, on the beach in Ostend, Belgium;  the seventh, at the invitation of Mariana Dias Coutinho and her research project “Curandeiras Entre Nós”, in Odemira, where a transfeminist tetralogy was offered; the eighth, ‘Deviate your house’ in dialogue with the film Fogo no Lodo (Fire in the Mud, 2023), by Catarina Laranjeiro and Daniel Barroca, proposed a territory of spiral relationships in the overprint of cinematic arts and counter-ethnography, a wild loop that lasted for about a month at Culturgest in Porto. Other feral screenings will follow.

Fulgor inhabits the utopian margins,⁸ but what does it mean to choose to inhabit the margins? It is a practice of living as if we were already free. Free to reinvent the ways we relate to each other and the ways we watch, make, distribute and curate cinema. It is a clear rejection of specialization, competition and commercial logics that don’t serve us. It is sabotaging the obsolete practices that dominate a large part of cinema’s ecosystem: the contingency of premieres and hierarchies, the exploitation and precariousness of female cinema workers, the plague of misogyny. It means questioning the exclusions imposed by digital film restorations, which are often distributed in formats inaccessible to a large part of the rural world. It is to boycott acts of censorship, silencing and extraction, and above, to denounce the organizations complicit in the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people.

It means affirming reciprocity, reparation and regeneration, weaving alliances and eco-feminist resonances,⁹ inhabiting the countryside in constant relation to the world. Trusting in the ability of people (all people) to relate to the conjured films: seeds of future or ancestral action, letters sent and received. Bringing cinema closer to life, a political-poetic-feminist-collective-in-metamorphosis-and-yet-to-be-made cinema. It’s anticipating, preparing, and at the same time allowing for deviation, improvisation. Returning again and again to the films we love, expanding cinema to an ecology of practices, to a radical pedagogy.

For example, on a hot summer’s day, under a generous cork oak tree, on blankets and burlap sacks, we  sat with the participants of the Provisional School for Nothing (The End Edition), in the village of Sabóia. We gathered for the workshop Dawn of Endings, Twilight of Beginnings, under the influence of Rosa de Areia (The Sand Rose, 1989), a cosmic film by Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis, which we screened later that evening. Together we rehearsed scores to remove thorns from our eyes, to listen attentively, to observe the wandering evil, to read aloud to the trees, to describe and invoke fragments of a landscape, to undo the laws that no longer serve us, mutating from dismemberment to enchantment with our creeping, hieratic, willful bodies, into the fulgor…

For example, thinking about and sensing water with the rivers, by the river, in an act of reciprocal care, attentive to the constitution of ancestral hydrological cycles, was and is the offering of FULGORES DO RIO, in which serpentine, subterranean and sidereal rivers are summoned to resonate with the Mira River and the beings that inhabit it, in friction, wonder and ecological urgency. In its first edition, last year, we invoked the Loire, the Homem and the Esla rivers with La Source de la Loire (1969) by George Rey, Vilarinho das Furnas (1971) by António Campos and Vuelta a Riaño (2023) by Miriam Martin, in the vicinity of the Santa Clara Dam. In Odemira, Ganga (L’Eau) by Velu Viswanadhan, brought the Ganges River in an offering to the migrant communities; Peixe (2016) by Jonathas de Andrade, Reciprocal Sacrifice (2022) and A Gente Rio/We River (2016) by Carolina Caycedo brought the São Francisco, the Serpentine and the Xingu rivers to the local fishermen and activist communities at Cais da Casa Branca; and we followed the Danube and its people towards the sea in Vers la Mer (1999) by Annik Leroy, where the Mira River meets the Atlantic ocean. In each part of the river, we connected with different allies, strengthening our ties to this river, this land and its communities.

For example, showing Jocelyne Saab’s films, testimonies to the end of a world, in clear solidarity with the Palestinian people and the Lebanese people, and then opening a circle of conversation in the ‘Way of Council’ tradition. Around a fire, one by one we picked up the talking stone to share, in the first person, to the internal rhythm of each of us, how the films we had just seen collectively resonated within us, in relation to the ongoing Genocide and the growing community of Israeli settlers in the region of Odemira. Guidelines: speak from the heart, think before you speak and speak in the first person, be concise, listen without reacting. Images and voices searching for each other, despite everything.

Maybe each film has its own way of forging ties with its viewers. Ours is an inland territory in fast mutation, and from here we will continue rehearsing the call and response of living and commoning with cinema. There are so many films we desire. From one of them, it emerges:

“In the battle between you and the world, choose the world.”¹⁰

In the shade of a mother tree,
Sílvia das Fadas

Sílvia das Fadas (born Sílvia Salgueiro) is an artist-filmmaker, convivial researcher and curator based in the south of Portugal. She attended Ar.Co’s Film/Moving Image Full Program, holds an MFA in Film and Video from CalArts (USA), was an artist fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Place Culture and Politics (NY). She has received scholarships from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the FCT, and is a doctoral candidate in the PhD-in-Practice programme at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. She is the curator of Cinema Fulgor, a cinema with mobile roots through the region of Alentejo and beyond. Her artistic practice involves research, texts, 16mm films, film curating and alternative pedagogies, which call for concrete utopias in the making. Her work has been presented in festivals and exhibition contexts such as Courtisane-Notes on Cinema, MoMA Doc Fortnight, Open City Documentary Festival, VIENNALE, Media City Film Festival, Cinemateca Portuguesa, Doc’s Kingdom Documentary Seminar, 2220 Arts+Archive, Light Field, or Wexner Centre for the Arts. She has taught interdisciplinary classes and workshops at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, CalArts, Pedreira and the Provisional School for Nothing, and was a guest artist in the ‘Verdes Anos’ programme at the Lisbon Municipal Galleries. She is interested in the politics intrinsic to cinematic practices and in cinema as a way of being together in restlessness and brokenness.

1. “There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.” ​See Modern Nature, Derek Jarman, Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1994, p.3. ↩︎
2. This is a reference to Light, Blaze, Fulgor – Auguries for a Non-Hierarchical Framing and Flourishing, an expanded film by Sílvia das Fadas with sound composition by Robert Blatt, in metamorphosis since 2017. ↩︎
3. A Village Life, by Louise Glück, always near. See: A Village Life, Louise Glück, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. ↩︎
4. Maria Gabriela Llansol’s oeuvre, from which we draw “the unexpected encounter of the diverse,” is the source of the fulgurous-scene that soon was revealed to us as Cinema Fulgor. LisboaLeipzig. O Encontro Inesperado do Diverso, Maria Gabriela Llansol, Lisboa: Edições Rolim, 1994, p.135. ↩︎
5.  We call Fulgores to the monthly film screenings or to film cycles like Fulgores de Abril (dedicated to April’s cinema or the legacy of the Carnation Revolution) or Fulgores do Rio (dedicated to riverine ecologies). We call Bravias to the feral screenings. ↩︎
6. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway,  Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. ↩︎
7. The regular programming of cinematic arts in the rural world is not a priority for the Portuguese art funding institutions at the national level. ↩︎
8. We invoke Avery F. Gordon (The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins, Avery F. Gordon, Fordham University Press, 2018), bell hooks (“Choosing the Margin as a Place of Radical Openness”, from Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics, Bell Hooks, Boston: South End Press, 1989), and Maria Gabriela Llansol when she states that ‘by right, we inherited the margins.’(Causa Amante, Maria Gabriela Llansol, Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 1996). ↩︎
9.  Cinema Fulgor weaves alliances and correspondences around common interests with projects such as Miragem – Artes Cinemáticas na Paisagem, on the island of Pico (Azores); Cine Cauce, in Jarandilla de la Vera (Spain); Rotations, in Los Angeles; OaxacaCine, in Mexico; , among others. ↩︎
10. Franz Kafka, as referenced by Huillet-Straub in Où gît votre sourire enfoui? (Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, 2001, France/Portugal, documentary) by Pedro Costa. ↩︎