The Cinema Ideal, located between Chiado and Bairro Alto, reopened on August 28, 2014, under the management of the production company Midas Filmes, which has continued to perform “an increasingly challenging survival work in a city whose center is struggling,” expressed in a press release today.
The anniversary is celebrated from Thursday through next week with 11 films, notably featuring three Portuguese works recently digitized by the Portuguese Cinematheque and which have been “very rarely seen in recent decades.”
These include “Nós por cá todos bem” (1977) by Fernando Lopes, introduced by former Cinematheque director José Manuel Costa; “Onde Bate o Sol” (1989) by Joaquim Pinto, with a presentation by Inês de Medeiros, Almada’s mayor, former actress, and a collaborator on the film; and “Três Irmãos” (1994) by Teresa Villaverde, who will be present at the session.
Cinema Ideal also brings back the restored cinema of directors António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, featuring “Trás-os-Montes” (1976), “Ana” (1982), “Rosa de Areia” (1989), and “Jaime” (1974).
Additionally, there will be a showcase of all films by French writer and director Guy Debord (1931-1994), “a central figure of the Situationist International and the Lettrist International,” which have remained unseen in the commercial circuit in Portugal.
The short film “On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time” (1959), regarding the creation of the situationist movement, and the feature “The Society of the Spectacle” (1973), based on the book of the same name and one of Debord’s best-known works, are two of the films to be screened at Ideal.
Focusing on current events and Palestine, Cinema Ideal revives the Israeli-Palestinian documentary “No Other Land” (2024), awarded this year at the Oscars, which highlights the demolition of Palestinian citizens’ homes by the Israeli army in the West Bank.
The film is a collaboration between Palestinian directors Ballal and Basel Adra, both residents of the occupied West Bank, and Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
On September 3, Ideal hosts the premiere of “Com a alma na mão,” a dialogue between exiled Iranian director Sepideh Farsi and Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, who passed away in April, shortly before its debut at the Cannes festival.
Regarding this film, whose box office proceeds will support the photojournalist’s family, the Galeria Monumental in Lisbon will host an exhibition of Fatma Hassona’s photographs from September 2 to 6.
Ideal is one of the few street-adjacent cinemas in Lisbon, outside a shopping center.
It is housed in a 19th-century building and an old cinema hall that has had various lives over more than a century. It was previously known as Salão Ideal, Piolho do Loreto, Cine Camões, and Cine Paraíso, until it was restored by producer Pedro Borges of Midas Filmes, reopening at the end of August 2014.
