Porto's documentary festival is back on 19 November, and a screening can cost you €3
The 13th Porto/Post/Doc runs from 19 to 28 November across eight venues in Porto and Matosinhos. It closes a three-year programme on migration, with focuses on Alain Gomis and Jan Ijäs, films on Elza Soares and João Aguardela, Porto on screen from 1931 to 2025, and passes from €40.
Porto/Post/Doc takes over the city’s screens again from 19 to 28 November, and the 13th edition has its programme out. That is ten days of what the festival calls cinema of the real (documentary bleeding into fiction, essay film and music) across eight venues in Porto and Matosinhos.
Living in someone else’s country
The core strand is “In the Land of Others”, the third and final chapter of a trilogy the festival began in 2024 with “The Movement of Peoples”. After two years on journeys and displacement, the question now is what happens once you arrive: how you make a home in a country that is not yours. Its five films include “Io Capitano” and the 1964 classic “I Am Cuba”.
The same thread runs through the two director focuses, one on Alain Gomis, a French filmmaker of Senegalese and Bissau-Guinean descent, the other on Finland’s Jan Ijäs. The festival’s own introduction to the edition also lists “The Future Is Punk”, on the movement’s early years, and “Another Story”, three films made by women around fifty years ago.
Music, Porto and Portuguese
The Transmission competition has five music documentaries. Two stand out for a Portuguese audience: Eryk Rocha’s “Elza”, on the final years of Elza Soares, and Paulo Miguel Antunes’s “The Sailor’s Life”, about João Aguardela, the voice behind Sitiados, Megafone and A Naifa.
The Cinema Falado competition has seven Portuguese-language films. One of them, “Nha Balila”, follows a batuku legend who travels to Portugal at the age of 92.
Porto also gets to watch itself. To mark 30 years since the Historic Centre became a World Heritage Site, the “In Between Images” strand gathers films shot in the city between 1931 and 2025.
Passes and vouchers
A festival pass costs €60 and covers every screening, with a €40 version for students, under-25s, over-65s and the unemployed. If you only want a few films, vouchers are the cheaper route: five screenings for €20 or ten for €30, which works out at €3 a film. They are valid at Batalha and Passos Manuel screenings, not concerts, and everything is sold at portopostdoc.bol.pt.
It is a good month for film. In Lisbon, LEFFEST marks its 20th year with David Cronenberg on the jury and wraps on the 15th, four days before Porto starts.
Image: Porto/Post/Doc
