Empowering Imagination

PLAY is a film festival entirely dedicated to a young audience, an environment for discussion in the domains of cinema and pedagogy, for cultural enrichment, aimed at a specific audience, creating a fruitful dialogue between international and Portuguese initiatives in the field of cinema. 

The festival takes place every February in Lisbon (in São Jorge Cinema and Cinemateca Jr.) and is followed by an average of multiple decentralised sessions all around Portugal. The festival programme proposes over 140 films in short, medium, or long feature formats, produced in different countries, favouring new ways of seeing the world and the art of cinema. There are 9 days filled with films entirely dedicated to young audiences, up to the age of 16. Offering a week full of films, music, talks, and workshops.

In 2023, Play embarked on a mission to promote and empower children’s films in Portugal by creating the PLAY PRO section with professionals’ meetings and the Laboratory Competition.

PLAY Festival and its year-long activities have nationwide coverage. Some of the activities taking place are aimed specifically at parents and/or teachers in order to provide them with tools for using cinema in their everyday interactions with the younger generation.

The relevance of this project is rooted in the idea that the experience of cinema is a door to the world, leading to the discovery of other realities. It is our goal to allow the creation of a fruitful and direct dialogue between Cinema and the younger generation. It is a space of leisure, education, and cultural enrichment, based on the assumption of film as an instrument for experiencing new realities, entertaining by learning to think and see. Therefore, the proposed project activities are designed following four principles:

● HIGH QUALITY of the films and the complementary events. Relevance of the content to suit different age groups.

● DIVERSITY – Films from around the world that portray different realities. Different genres and aesthetics.

● INCLUSION – A festival accessible for all.

● LITERACY – Strengthen decoding skills, understanding, and critical sense.

The “PLAY festival” concept was born in 2013 when three women from the fields of design, education, and cinema made a crowdfunding campaign to organize a film festival for children. Their main motivation was to provide younger audiences with easy access to diversified cinema content and help them discover the world of films, benefiting from their educational value.