On its 30th edition, Curtas makes a symbolic return to where it – truly – all began. When Vila do Conde Film Club (which put together the festival’s early iterations and is still autonomously, regularly, and uninterruptedly active today) started its history, it held its weekly screenings at Santa Casa da Misericórdia’s [Holy House of Mercy’s] assembly hall, equipped at that time with a 35mm projector, from 1990 to 1991. More than three decades after it last hosted a film screening, its mechanical gears will be back in action with the old projector occupying a prominent place in the presentation of a 35mm copy of Joris Ivens’s and Mannus Franken’s masterpiece “Rain”. This movie is also part of the festival’s history: it was screened in 1995, when Manoel de Oliveira chose it on the occasion of the celebrations of 100 years of cinema, with an introduction by the filmmaker himself; and in 2002, it was part of one of the programmes in an itinerant cycle that toured several Portuguese cities, marking Curtas’ 10-year anniversary. The film is an important milestone in Joris Ivens’s career and in film history itself, as an essential work of avant-garde cinema, and somehow part of a tradition that came to be known as city symphonies (cultivated by Oliveira himself with “Working on the Douro River”, and whose best-known examples are Walter Ruttmann’s “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera”). The subtle and poetic variation operated by the film takes place when it goes from observing city life and redirects its attention towards the rain that starts falling, focusing on the meteorological phenomenon: the raindrops, the clouds, or the reflections in the water. 

The screening will feature live music, with Paulo Praça’s guitar scoring the rhythm of Amsterdam streets and its downpours.