Pere Portabella (Figueres, 1927) is one of the most singular and decisive figures in contemporary culture. A filmmaker, producer, and political activist, his trajectory has made cinema not only a space of formal invention, but also a site of critical thought and of articulation between disciplines, generations, and spheres of collective life.
As a producer, he has brought into being key works of Spanish cinematic modernity, opening breaches in the film industry of the Franco regime and navigating the mechanisms of its censorship, in legendary films such as Delinquents by Carlos Saura, The Little Coach by Marco Ferreri and Viridiana by Luis Buñuel. As a filmmaker, he has developed from Catalonia a radical and unclassifiable body of work, in permanent tension between poetic drive (Don’t Count on your Fingers, Nocturno 29, Umbracle), political interpellation (The Dinner, Catalan Poets, General Report I and II), conceptual vindication (Vampir-Cuadecuc, Miró Other, Removal) and the exploration of new narratives (Warsaw Bridge, The Silence before Bach). His films decode normative languages and expand the limits of cinema in dialogue with other art forms, and for this reason they have become a reference point for several generations of creators and thinkers seeking to extend this assertion of cinema’s centrality through formal experience.
But Portabella’s significance is not exhausted by his filmography. His political trajectory encompasses the activation of multiple spaces of anti-Franco mobilisation, such as the founding of the Assemblea de Catalunya; the restoration of institutional legitimacy, through the organisation and staging of the return from exile of the President of the Catalan Government Josep Tarradellas; the establishment of democracy, through his election as senator and member of the commission for the 1978 Constitution, and as an independent member of the Parliament of Catalonia on the PSUC lists; and his continually renewed commitment to contemporary alternative social movements.
For all these reasons, Portabella embodies an unusual form of public intervention: that of someone who brings together aesthetic radicality, civic courage, and a propositional vision of a shared future, with the capacity to build bridges between diverse positions and ways of thinking.
To speak of Pere Portabella is to speak of a body of work, but also of a transmissible impulse: a way of setting ideas, alliances, and modes of practice into motion. For this reason, the occasion of his 100th anniversary is not conceived as a retrospective commemoration, but as an activation of his legacy. Acció Portabella arises precisely from that impulse: to recognise in his trajectory a renewed invitation to think of cinema, art, civic politics, and culture as spaces of connection, critical imagination, and transformative action.
For more information, please read the Pere Portabella website.