The Hora Cinemateca program returns to RTP Memória with a new season. The series kicks off on October 11 and runs until February 2026, airing every Saturday at 9 p.m. Continuing the focus on the 50th anniversary of the April 25 Revolution, this new edition showcases short and medium-length documentary films recently digitized by Cinemateca Portuguesa.
The revolutionary period was a fertile time for film production. Created by both professionals and amateurs, these works sought to document the revolutionary process while serving as instruments for the political awakening of citizens. Many of these films were marked by a strong sense of urgency: the militant cinema of the time saw it as imperative to reveal the country’s social and economic realities, long silenced by the Estado Novo dictatorship.
Thus, alongside films portraying political events of the revolution or related themes—such as the labor movement, the occupation of rural estates, or housing issues in urban areas—this Hora Cinemateca season also includes titles that explore alternative, less hierarchical models of education, the role of the arts in the post-revolutionary period, and others that depict the traditions and daily lives of different Portuguese communities through an ethnographically inspired lens.
The program also revisits the memory of television itself, specifically RTP, as a key agent in disseminating the revolution, thanks to the significant output of production cooperatives connected to it, such as Cinequipa and Cinequanon—the latter represented by titles in this current season.
The series features works by Leonel Brito, Ricardo Costa, Amílcar Lyra, António de Macedo, and Manuel Costa e Silva, among many others, filmed from the north to the south of Portugal, including the islands. Through these films—each relating to the revolution in different ways—the program aims to continue revisiting and reflecting on the meaning of April 25.
The partnership between Cinemateca Portuguesa and RTP Memória, launched in 2020, seeks to highlight the ongoing work of conservation, preservation, and digitization carried out by Cinemateca over recent years and decades. In addition to the more widely known national fiction films, Hora Cinemateca strives for diversity—both in the types of films preserved and in the range of periods, genres, and filmmakers represented.