Family Film Project

The Family Film Project has been held annually in Porto, Portugal, since 2012, with Né Barros and Filipe Martins as its artistic directors.

Dedicated to alternative forms of cinematic expression, the festival emphasizes the experimental and archaeological dimensions of the moving image, seeking to highlight the challenges of cinema in its dual testimonial and artistic nature—whether through ethnographic-experimental film, archival and found-footage cinema, the aesthetic reappropriation of home movies, or the hybridization between film and the performing arts.

In addition to its regular competitive section, the program always includes a special focus on internationally renowned filmmakers, artists, and scholars, such as Jonas Mekas (2012), Péter Forgács (2013), Alina Marazzi (2015), João Canijo (2016), Regina Guimarães (2017), Bill Nichols (2018), Daniel Blaufuks (2018), Jaimie Baron (2019), Cláudia Varejão (2019), Harun Farocki (2020), Ruben Östlund (2021), Catarina Alves Costa (2022), Naomi Kawase (2023), Ben Russell (2024), Jay Rosenblatt (2025), among many others.

The competitive screenings are traditionally organized into three thematic strands: Lives and Places (focusing on aesthetic approaches to everyday life, habitats, and biographical narratives);
Memory and Archive (dedicated to temporality and the poetic reappropriation of testimonies and found footage); and Connections (centered on relational, interpersonal, and intercultural dynamics).
The competition also usually includes sections devoted to Fiction and Animation.

With its diverse lines of action, the festival situates itself at the conceptual boundaries between cinema, other art forms, and critical thought. Beyond its film screenings, the Family Film Project organizes a wide range of parallel cultural events: exhibitions and installations (often extending beyond the festival dates), film-concerts, site-specific performances across the city (Private Collection), as well as masterclasses, conferences, and book releases devoted to the ethnographic, anthropological, and aesthetic dimensions of cinema and the arts.