International Conference: Contemporary Portuguese Image and Censorship

Please note: this event has passed

4th and 6th December 2019. King's College London.

Day 1: 4th December.
Day 2: 6th December.

More information on the Contemporary Portuguese Image and Censorship, including programme (pdf).

In this conference, the moving image is the starting point for an urgent debate around the topic of freedom of expression. Until very recently, what appeared to be an unquestionable right, is now caught in a battlefield between extreme right-wing perspectives and political correctness. Important voices have raised the fact that censorship is again on the rise in the Western world; particularly the self-censorship of authors - more than ever, this type of proscription has become almost a survival skill.

A wide variety of topics will be discussed by a diverse panel of international speakers: from colonialism, the home film archive and the National Fund during the dictatorship years, to the role of gender in censorship, to the challenges faced by visual artists today (with comparisons between the space of the gallery and that of the cinema).

Today, forty-five years after state censorship was officially abolished in Portugal, we seem to have gained enough temporal distance to warrant some objectivity in our historical analysis of what it meant to live under its rule in Portugal, decade after decade. This conference will bring together a number of key researchers from France, Portugal and the UK to discuss the topic of censorship in contemporary Portuguese images; a debate relevant not solely for Portugal but to all of those who understand the pressing relevance it stubbornly holds in our present day.

Scientific Committee and Organisation

João Paulo Silvestre – King’s College London

Érica Faleiro Rodrigues – Birkbeck, University of London / IHC – Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

Co-curator Julião Sarmento screening and talk

Bruno Marques - IHA / Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

Organisation

Centre for Portuguese Language and Culture (King’s College London)

and Utopia - UK Portuguese Film Festival

The conference is part of Utopia – UK Portuguese Film Festival 2019

The full festival listings.

Project supported by

Instituto Camões, Portugal