The Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB), in Lisbon, will have a new festival dedicated to the Portuguese language in May, with more than a hundred participants and the artistic direction of cultural programmer Aida Tavares.
The new initiative, announced today, is called FeLiCidade – Festival of Language and Freedom in the City and is scheduled for May 4 and 5, in various venues of the CCB and with free admission.
“Dozens of speakers and listeners from all over the world help us to reflect on a relationship that is hundreds of years old, to discuss the plurality of roots and identities, without erasing the complexity, violence and exclusion of history,” reads the press release.
According to the program, this festival will feature concerts, staged readings, cinema, autograph sessions with authors, among other initiatives.
There are also talks scheduled “exclusively for the quadrangulation of Portugal, Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor”.
“Three writers from each of the transoceanic vertices will talk,” the organization says, naming some of the invited authors, such as the Brazilian indigenous activist Daniel Munduruku, the Portuguese writers Joana Bértholo and Isabela Figueiredo, the Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, the Cape Verdean Germano Almeida, the Timorese Luís Cardoso and the São Toméan poet Conceição Lima.
The festival will also celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Camões, the 100th anniversary of Alexandre O’Neill and the appearance of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Ricardo Reis; and analyze the poetics of the songs of Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso.
Nenny, La Familia Gitana, Puta da Silva, Luca Argel & Filipe Sambado, Scúru Fitchádu & Azia, Mynda Guevara and Juana na Rap are some of the names lined up to perform at the festival.
In the cinema, the common thread between the chosen films will be literature written in Portuguese. Of particular note is the premiere of the new digital copy of George Pallu’s “O Primo Basílio” (1923), with new music by Filipe Raposo, who will perform it for the first time on the piano.
The documentary series “Saramago’s Heirs”, by Carlos Vaz Marques and Graça Castanheira, about the writers who won the José Saramago literary prize, will also be shown.
FeLiCidade is one of the first public projects by Aida Tavares, former director of the Teatro Municipal São Luiz in Lisbon, who was appointed artistic director for performing arts and thought at the CCB in December.
The full program is available at www.felicidadefestival.com.
