Doc’s Kingdom brings together more than 100 international participants from November 13 to 18 to explore the role of cinema in a changing world.
International Documentary Film Seminar will take place between November 13 and 18 in Odemira, Beja district, with the theme being the role of cinema “in a world in crisis.”
Film screenings and debates are featured in the program of the initiative, organised by Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário (Association for Documentary Film), with funding from the Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual (ICA) and the Odemira City Council.
“Undercurrents, Counterspells” is the theme of the 2026 seminar, which will bring together “more than a hundred participants from various parts of the world” over six days in the coastal municipality of Alentejo, the organisation announced.
Cinema and political resistance
In a statement sent to the Lusa news agency, Apordoc explained that the seminar will question “the role of cinema in a world where the omnipresence of images is an impassive witness to accelerated processes of dispossession and genocidal colonial violence, incapable of altering their course.”
The goal is to allow for “a broader reflection on the conditions of production, circulation, and reception of images in times of accelerated expropriation and genocidal colonial brutality.”
In this context, the program will bring together “a collection of works committed to revolutionary imagination and reflection on historical images,” evoking “five centuries of Mesoamerican resistance to colonial violence,” the “tireless Palestinian liberation movement,” or “the consequences of utopian experiences in the former Yugoslavia, postwar Lebanon, or rural Portugal since the beginning of the 20th century.”
“The curatorial approach is not organised around a linear theme, but rather around the encounter between ways of making cinema and thinking about political resistance as forms of conjuring, building, and maintaining living worlds, despite the persistence of oppression and violence,” added Apordoc.
International filmmakers featured
In 2026, the Doc's Kingdom programming committee included the collaboration of programmer, film critic and professor Victor Guimarães (Brazil) and cultural organiser, filmmaker and programmer Jowe Harfouche (originally from Lebanon and based in Germany), who joined the seminar's co-directors, Catarina Boieiro and Stefanie Baumann.
During the initiative, works by filmmakers Camilo Restrepo (Colombia), Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco (Mexico), Marta Popivoda (Serbia), Mohamed Soueid (Lebanon), and Oraib Toukam (USA), among others, will be presented.
The seminar program also includes works by the Portuguese authors José Álvaro Morais (1943-2004) and Sílvia das Fadas.
Documentary premiere and exhibition
Also planned is the premiere of the short film directed by João Pedro Soares, as part of the first edition of the Vislumbre program – Documentary Creation Residency in Odemira, a joint initiative of Doc's Kingdom and Cinema Fulgor, with the support of the Odemira City Council.
According to Apordoc, the film was made this year in the Alentejo region, “focusing on tomato cultivation, its practices, stories and mythologies.”
Associated with the short film, an exhibition will be on display at Espaço CRIAR, in Odemira, focusing on the creative process developed in the region, “particularly in dialogue with small local farmers.”