The film-concert, scheduled for 11:30 p.m. immediately following the festival’s official opening ceremony, has been conceived specifically for this edition and is the result of a collaboration between composers Bruno Miguel and Nuno Canavarro. Drawing on images and fragments from films such as Étude Cinégraphique sur une Arabesque (1929), Thèmes et Variations (1928), Disque 957 (1928), and excerpts from La Coquille et le Clergyman (1927) — often cited as one of the first surrealist works in the history of cinema — the performance proposes a new interpretation of the visual universe of a filmmaker who sought to expand the boundaries of cinematic language.

According to Nuno Rodrigues, a member of the Curtas Vila do Conde programming team, the performance immerses audiences in the work of a director who, as early as the 1920s, was seeking to free cinema from conventional narrative structures, bringing it closer to rhythm, sensation, and abstraction. The project revisits the concept of “pure cinema”, which Dulac explored through visual experiments focused on movement, repetition, and the musicality of images.

For Bruno Miguel and Nuno Canavarro, the creation also represents an opportunity to recover and highlight a fundamental figure in film history whose artistic significance remained insufficiently recognised for many decades. Through the combination of archival materials and a new sonic approach, the cine-concert seeks to establish a dialogue between the filmmaker’s historical legacy and the contemporary possibilities of audiovisual performance.

Tickets are available at Vila do Conde Municipal Theatre's box office or at www.bol.pt.