Is anyone watching Portuguese cinema? 9,208 people saw the year's biggest home-grown film
Institute figures to the end of June put Ivo M. Ferreira's Projecto Global at the top of the national box office. The revealing number is not the audience, it is the screening count.
Nine thousand two hundred and eight. That is how many people bought a ticket for Ivo M. Ferreira’s Projecto Global, and this year it is also enough to make it the most-watched Portuguese film in Portuguese cinemas. The figures come from the national film institute and run to the end of June.
The film, about the Forças Populares 25 de Abril in the 1980s, came out of the Rotterdam festival and took 60,222 euros. Behind it sits Pedro Cabeleira’s Entroncamento on 8,688 admissions, then José Filipe Costa’s Pai Nosso — Os Últimos Dias de Salazar on 5,872 and Luís Campos’s Terra Vil on 4,422. Simão Cayatte’s O Barqueiro rounds out the top five with 4,206.
The number that explains it better
Reading those totals as proof that Portuguese audiences do not want Portuguese films is the easy conclusion, and probably the wrong one. Projecto Global reached 9,208 people across 962 screenings. The fortieth most-watched title on the general chart, which includes every release, got 2,197 screenings. The most successful domestic film of the year had less than half the chances to find an audience as a film that did not even make the top thirty.
When a film plays in a handful of rooms, at awkward hours, for a couple of weeks, the ticket count says more about scheduling than about appetite. Per screening the picture flips: Entroncamento pulled almost as many people from 527 showings as Projecto Global did from 962.
Half the year is still to come
There is a good reason not to settle the argument in August. Last year, three of the five most-watched Portuguese films did not open until August or later, and the second half of 2026 brings Sérgio Graciano’s Playback and Ruben Alves’s Santo António, o Casamenteiro de Lisboa, the latter with a far more commercial profile than anything currently on the list.
In the meantime, if you missed these in cinemas, Portuguese films are landing on HBO Max this month, and Projecto Global is available to rent. The full table of domestic releases sits in the ICA’s box-office data.
By Lucy Bennett
Chart: Tugadaily, with data from Portugal's film institute (ICA)
