RTP2 will broadcast the film SEMPRE, by Luciana Fina, on 29 November at 11:30 p.m. The film is a production of Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema.
Premiered last year in its world premiere at the Giornate degli Autori of the Venice International Film Festival and as the opening film of Doclisboa 2024, SEMPRE has since circulated widely on the national and international festival circuit, and was awarded the Grand Prize of the City of Coimbra at the 30th edition of the Caminhos do Cinema Português Festival.
Drawing primarily on the universe of Portuguese cinema recently digitized by Cinemateca Portuguesa, SEMPRE also includes excerpts from other archives, notably RTP’s. The film revisits the period marking the transition from dictatorship to freedom, calling upon cinema, television, radio, the arts, and music as tools in the construction of a new country. Today, fifty years after the Carnation Revolution, it is through cinema—through the gaze and poetics of these filmmakers, as well as radio broadcasters and television directors—that we can enter the fabric of the dreams and perspectives of the revolution that freed the country from fascism.
Establishing a dialogue between past and present, SEMPRE interweaves archival images with contemporary footage of demonstrations for the right to housing, decent work, culture, and gender equality, revealing the continued relevance of the struggles of 1974.
In the words of the Caminhos Festival jury, SEMPRE is “a film that paints, with the colors and textures of the present, the same collective mural created by the artists and actors of April. A remake, a fiction, a documentary, an essay, a fresco? All of this and none of it. Only a project like this, based on the colossal research effort of wanting to see everything, could move us in this way. In these 50 years since the Revolution, what more beautiful, fair, and sincere tribute could we hope for to tear down and rebuild the walls that always block our path?”
After its broadcast on 29 November, the film will be available for two weeks on RTP Play.