The city of Porto, a beautiful baroque town, capital of Northern Portugal, overlooking the Douro river is considered one of the "Best Tourist Destinations in Europe of 2017". Porto has been hosting one of the most prestigious European (if not global) film festivals for 37 years.
There are 10 days of celebration for the world of cinema, in which producers, directors, actors, distributors and (a whole lot) of spectators meld in a multifaceted program with focus on the fantasy genre. Therefore, it's unsurprising that aside from a horror movie, the festival also screens a drama, a documentary, an art house film or and an experimental piece.

There are 10 categories, four of them are competitive with unique international judges who "feed" on the most recent international productions. There are round 50 countries every year are represented for a grand total of 200 to 250 long or short films, all of them never before seen in Portugal. There will be conferences, debates, Q&A's, a lecture dedicated to cinema in schools and the creation of a cultural zeitgeist. The Arts will be be present in this multifaceted event with book presentations and plastic art exhibitions.

Great names in cinema have passed through Porto. Around 200 guests are invited annually, including Max von Sidow, Guillermo del Toro, Wim Wenders, John Hurt, Rosana Arquette, Danny Boyle, Ben Kingsley, Paul Schrader (just to name a few) and they have been coming to Porto to showcase their films, some are even Shown before their worldwide early screenings.

The program, as always is very new and incorporates productions being shown in early screenings throughout the world and Europe. The festival brings to Porto dozens of journalists and foreign distributors, who can then watch the movies that will enter the commercial circuit "firsthand". At the same time, the Festival has a mini Film Market, the Industry Screenings which are means to connect to the movie industry.

Tickets are sold online, with each one costing 5 Euros, or 8 Euros for two, and passes for all screenings are 100 Euros. The 37th edition of the Porto International Cinema Festival, or Fantasporto, was created in 1981.

I chose to translate a text on Fantasporto not because I’m a big fan of supernatural films. In fact, I hardly have time to watch movies at all! But because I’d very much like to. I see ads for the festival every year since the year I moved to Porto and it’s always intrigued me. I thought if I forced myself to do an cursory research on the topic, I’d be more excited about it next year. And I am!

- Mariana Costa

History of Portuguese Culture in Modern Times by José  Eduardo Franco

PREFACE

“The historian is a manipulator of time. He locks time in a field, or a castle made of words (...). A manipulator of time in the sense that he intervenes even when he does not want to intervene, conditioned to some form of conception of present and future, he is still (...) a man of his trade, a man of his trade, a real craftsman. Obviously, the historian lives and has lived in your time. He carries its traces in his body and mind.

António Borges Coelho

The research and teaching of Portuguese Culture as History and as an object of interdisciplinary study have grown in the last decades in the academic field of Human and Social Sciences in Portugal.

In fact, a course in the History of Portuguese Culture with various forms of approaching in conformity with the pedagogical-didactic architecture of the course for the teacher, having been considered in different curriculum of higher education in Portugal, can and should make up the fundamental material for the basis of knowledge with transversal usage to various areas of knowledge.

Nonetheless, in Manuel Antunes`s line the of thought, culture is that which makes a human fully human. Higher education in the History of Culture is situated in time and space, it is confined to the borders of national culture as cultural communities become essential to approaching the so-called identity cultures. It is understood here the cultural phenomenon as “world of meaning“, which was presumed by Pedro Calafate in the context of critical thematization of Portuguese culture and his theorem around the concept of “cultural community of origin“, taking in the background thinking of Max Weber as interpreted by Francisco Gama Caeiro.

The teachings and research of a history of culture is thus determined and bound as a particular field of a cultural phenomenon that is characterized by analysis of its own contours. It cannot separate itself from the branches that connect it to the problematic field of a culture that is universally understood. This effort of the undercurrent of an analysis that would become too isolationist permits opening horizons of comprehension and meaning with a view of fostering an increasingly comprehensive spiral approach. We will then have, soon enough, a vision of human culture understood in an increasingly complex dimension raised by the questioning of its whole, where the individual is connected to the universal.

Original Source: https://goo.gl/Wzmybw (pp 5-6)

- Badriah Alzahrani.