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The pandemic, although disastrous for most parts of the economy, had one minor upside: a boost in online viewing. The number of subscribers of Portugal’s VOD platform Filmin, for example, has tripled compared with last year, due in part to the lockdown. “We grew as much in three months as we forecast for two years,” Filmin Portugal manager Anette Dujisin told Variety. Classic films have played a major part in driving that growth.

Despite challenges with local classics, Filmin is seeing growing success with heritage films and catalog titles as well as new releases. Filmin has received constant requests from subscribers – even loud demands from some – for more classic films since the service went online in 2016, Dujisin said.

The feedback affirms “that a VOD platform dedicated to independent cinema is not complete without a certain body of classical films,” Dujisin said. “So since the beginning we have been making...

Cíntia Gil is concerned about the future of Portuguese independent film. In a letter of protest shared with IndieWire, the co-director of Doclisboa calls on her country’s government to address a 2013 decree-law that led to the establishment of a new executive board on the Portuguese Film Institute (Ica) described by Gil as “seemingly allergic to its responsibility and ignorant of the Ica’s regulatory role.”

Read More: Locarno: How Modern Portuguese Cinema Is Uniting the Past and the Present

A vital part of that role is to select juries that analyze submissions to the Ica. “The outcome of this situation has been immediately evident,” notes Gil: “The requirement expressed in the regulation that jury members be ‘personalities of recognized cultural merit’ has not been met.” Read her full letter below:

Read More: Documentary Filmmaking is Having a Moment — in Portugal

Letter Of Protest

addressed to His Excellency Mr. President and Honorable Mr.

In 2009, the best film in Competition at the Berlinale was Maren Ade's Everyone Else (Fwiw, it came away with 1.5 Silver Bears, the 1 for Best Actress Birgit Minichmayr, the .5 for tying with Adrián Biniez's Gigante for the Jury Grand Prix; the Golden Bear that year went to Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow). Three years on (!), the trio that made Everyone Else worth talking up to this day (see, for example, Kevin B Lee's new video essay on a key scene at Fandor; see, too, Mike D'Angelo on the same scene a year ago at the Av Club) is back in Competition, albeit in three different films. Lars Eidinger has drawn the shortest straw, taking on the lead in Hans-Christian Schmid's rather dismal Home for the Weekend. Minichmayr's fared better opposite Jürgen Vogel in Matthias Glasner's new film, though I seriously doubt many of us will...