Pere Portabella’s Clandestine Cinema in Late Francoism

Seminar with Pablo La Parra Pérez

03-04 September | Casa do Comum — Rua da Rosa 285, Lisboa

[The Ongoing Seminar #04]

This seminar delves into the radical projects that Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella made clandestinely during the final years of Franco’s regime. Portabella produced titles that challenged the limits of state censorship—most notably Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961)—and experienced, as a filmmaker, the regime’s cultural and political repression.  Afterwards, Portabella turned to clandestinity in the late 1960s, working outside the frameworks of legality and the film industry. 

These years, during which the filmmaker moved between underground filmmaking and active participation in the anti-Franco opposition, left behind a corpus of films that defy categorization, in which fierce criticism of the regime coexists with exquisite formal experimentation around the expressive and political possibilities of cinema. Combining film screenings, documents from the filmmaker’s archive recently entrusted to the Filmoteca de Catalunya, and critical dialogues with other sources, some of the topics to be addressed include the dialectics between avant-garde aesthetics and political commitment; the possible iterations of the concept of militant cinema; and the afterlives and political activation of the archival traces of past struggles.

PROGRAMME

Thursday, 03 September, 4-8pm

Lath House: A Very Short Introduction to Pere Portabella

Film Screening: Umbracle (Pere Portabella, 1972, 85’).

Accompanied by a lecture and the presentation of film fragments

Friday, 04 September, 4-8pm

An Archive of Impossible Images

Film Screening: El sopar [1974 version] (Pere Portabella, 1974, 60’)

Accompanied by an illustrated lecture including documents and films from the Portabella archive and other political and artistic sources from the period.

The seminar will take place in English.

Free and open to everyone. As places are limited, registration is mandatory. Please send an email to: phildoc@fcsh.unl.pt

BIOGRAPHY

Pablo La Parra Pérez is the director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya. Between 2018 and 2024, he served as a professor and Head of the Research Department at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. He led the archive and research project Zinemaldia 70: All Possible Histories, which led to the preservation, research, and accessibility of the historical archive of the San Sebastian International Film Festival. He holds a Ph.D. from New York University, with a thesis entitled “Displaced Cinema: Militant Film Culture and Political Dissidence in Spain (1966-1982)”. His academic work has been published in international journals such as the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Alphaville, and Sociologias and volumes such as Cinemas of Global Solidarity (Oxford UP, 2026), Performing Memory: Corporeality, Visuality, and Mobility after 1968 (Berghahn Books, 2023), Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (Indiana UP, 2020), and 1968 and Global Cinema (Wayne State UP, 2018), among others.

Organised by Doc’s Kingdom in partnership with the Institute of Radical Imagination and Filmoteca de Catalunya, and part of the centenary program on Pere Portabella’s oeuvre, Acción Portabella. 

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The Ongoing Seminar is a series of encounters in Lisbon dedicated to critical thinking and collective reflection on the role of cinema in the present, the relationship between images and politics, and the emancipatory potential of documentary practices. The cycle is co-organised by Doc’s Kingdom and IFILNOVA/CineLab, and supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the project UID/00183/2025.