ACCIÓN PORTABELLA

Spain’s Ministry of Culture and the Department of Culture of the Government of Catalonia are jointly preparing the commemoration of the centenary of filmmaker and political activist Pere Portabella (Figueres, 1927), in which Filmoteca de Catalunya and Filmoteca Española play a prominent role. The initiative aims to highlight this director’s figure and the legacy of his work on filmmakers, artists, and social movements he has influenced.

This celebration seeks to extend Pere Portabella’s vital, political, and artistic message: a drive toward dialogue, courage, and the centrality of the avant-garde, with his well-known ability to generate agreement, provocation, movement, and succession. It is an invitation to explore the renewed capacity of cinema and artistic practice to take risks through formal radicalism.

Within this framework, a series of interconnected activities will take place throughout 2026 and 2027, precisely when Portabella will turn one hundred. The approach of ‘Acción Portabella’ is that each participating hub develops its own distinctive strategy, creating a continuous handover across the different activities.

Through his close circle, Pere Portabella will remain informed about the initiatives to be undertaken, thereby establishing an overall map of international connectivity that will be reflected on the centenary website. The website will be presented soon and will become a visual format showing the complicity of this pragmatic reflection across different fields of culture and thought, and across the generations involved.