The begining
The Founders
Beatriz Pacheco Pereira | José Manuel Pereira | Mário Dorminsky
The genesis of the Cooperative Cinema Novo, CRL, a Collective Person of Public Utility, resides in a restricted group of people who were connected by taste to the cinema, establishing their devotion to the Seventh Art through their participation in the film club movement. After this experience, these moviegoers cut themselves off from the film club model, deciding to found a Revista de cinema in 1978, a new project with new editorial characteristics, baptized exactly with the name of Revista Cinema Novo and whose periodic edition took place throughout 12 years.
Mário Dorminsky and Beatriz Pacheco Pereira, the founders, were part of this group of moviegoers, whose home was the headquarters of the magazine, at Rua Diogo Brandão 46, to which collaborators such as José Acácio Castro, José Manuel Pereira (as an illustrator and Fantasporto co-founder), António Reis, Henrique de Barros, Danyel Guerra and others. Right at the launch of this new cultural project, the masterpiece “Intolerância” by D.W.Griffith is displayed at the then Insurance Union of Porto, marking the beginning of the work of this cultural structure that dates back to September 23, 1978.
45 years of Fantasporto
In January 1981, history was made: the 1st International Fantastic Film Festival was held, meaning that the popular Fantasporto was born, which was then always organized at the end of February, following an international calendar of festivals, and which continues to this day. But the year 1981 would not end without the organization of more cycles, especially the one dedicated to the "New North American Cinema" (April) and "François Truffaut" (October), dedicated to the leading figure of the "Nouvelle Vague" and French cinema.
Part of the work carried out focused on preserving what Fantasporto and Cinema Novo had done, but also in the context of Porto as a cinephile city.
From the outset, a text and image archive was organized, based on the collections of founders Beatriz Pacheco Pereira and Mário Dorminsky. This archive is organized by directors, actors and actresses and Festivals in a total of around 30,000 files that include pressbooks, newspaper and magazine article clippings, film programmes and lobby cards.
There is also an archive of film, video and multimedia magazines in general based on extensive collections of Portuguese and foreign magazines dating back to 1910. This archive continues to be based on magazines such as Cahiers du Cinema, Fotogramas, Première (Portuguese, French and American), Cahiers de la Cinemateque, Sight and Sound, Dirigido Por..., Empire, Preview, Neon, Fotogramas, Film Total, etc.
But it didn't stop at An archive of film posters, organized by theme and country, totaling more than five thousand; a large library of more than 15. 000 books and catalogs of film cycles and festivals, with particular emphasis on monographic books on directors and cinematographies, as well as reference books (dictionaries and guides); a video library of videocassettes, Laser Discs, DVDs and Blu-rays, mainly of classic North American films and European cinema, many of them unseen in the cinema, not least because of the emerging collection of films that are sent for selection to the Porto International Film Festival.
