CCB hosts first Portuguese language and freedom festival FeLiCidade – Showbiz

This festival will occupy several spaces at the CCB during the weekend, with an extensive program for different audiences, with more than a hundred invited authors, artists and intellectuals, crossing two celebrations: that of World Portuguese Language Day, on the 5th of May, and the 50th anniversary of the revolution of April 25, 1974.

“Dozens of speakers and listeners from all geographies help us to reflect on a relationship spanning hundreds of years, to discuss the plurality of roots and identities, without erasing the complexity, violence and exclusion of History”, reads the press release from FeLiCidade.

Among the planned initiatives is, for example, a class by translator and researcher Frederico Lourenço on Camões, thus marking the 500th anniversary of the poet’s birth, and another by writer Maria Antónia Oliveira on Alexandre O’Neill, now that he has been reissued the author’s biography.

Several conversations are also proposed, putting into dialogue writers “from each of the transoceanic vertices” in Portuguese, such as the Brazilian indigenous activist Daniel Munduruku, the Portuguese writers Joana Bértholo, Dulce Maria Cardoso, Hélia Correia and Isabela Figueiredo, the Timorese Luís Cardoso or the São Tomé poet Conceição Lima.

Also noteworthy is the conference lecture “Gender”, on “the manifestation of gender in the Portuguese language”, by Brazilian playwright and actress Keli Freitas, and the session “Words that serve me – Queer Glossary”, by André Tecedeiro and Laura Falésia.

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 for concerts at the festival.

Among the editorial presentations is “Tarrafal”, the book by journalist João Pina that recovers photographs taken by his great-grandparents in the Tarrafal concentration camp, in Cape Verde.

At the cinema, the documentary series “Herdeiros de Saramago”, by Carlos Vaz Marques and Graça Castanheira, will also be shown, about the writers who won the José Saramago literary prize.

The festival has free entry and is one of the first initiatives of the CCB’s artistic director for performing arts and thought, Aida Tavares, appointed at the end of 2023.