Educational Project
Minuto Lumière
The Minuto Lumière project was born out of the urgent need to recover our gaze. In a time saturated with stimuli and instant images, we propose the camera, in this case, the cell phone, as a gesture of deceleration, listening, and attention. Attention, in this sense, is political. The technical fragility of the medium, which limits, blurs, and shakes, becomes an asset here: it invites essentialism, restraint, and an aesthetic of attention.
It is not about teaching cinema. It is about placing students, especially those who live between different languages, belongings, and geographies, at the center of a process of discovery: of what it is to see, what it is to show, what it is to tell. A telling that passes through the body, through light, through listening to reality. A cinema of instinct and presence.
Along the way, it becomes clear that this project resonates particularly with students who are often on the margins of the traditional school model. Through Minuto Lumière, they feel seen and able to see. Cinema, here, is language, but it is also a territory of recognition.
If there is one thing that drives this project, it is the desire to restore the school's poetic and transformative dimension. And to cinema, its original power of discovery and sharing. Minuto Lumière is just that: an invitation to see the world as if for the first time.
Project Framework
Minuto Lumière is an educational tool based on a classic exercise in cinematographic initiation: the recording of a one-minute fixed shot with a determined beginning and end, inspired by the early experiments of the Lumière brothers.
Developed in public schools in Greater Lisbon, this project's main tool is the cell phone, rescuing it from the distracting logic of digital culture and giving it a role in reconnecting with reality. The proposal is simple but demanding: observe, listen, choose, and frame.
In the last year, Minuto Lumière has been implemented in more than 50 school sessions, with the participation of around 300 students from highly diverse backgrounds – from suburban groups to schools with a strong presence of foreign students.
The pedagogical experience was carried out in the context of the National Cinema Plan, with direct coordination in schools such as the Odivelas Secondary School.
Context and Relevance
The project operates at the intersection of cinema, education, and citizenship. It is aimed at primary and secondary school students, focusing on realities marked by multiculturalism, cultural displacement, and weaknesses in individual expression.
In a school context often shaped by rigid curricula and the logic of results, Minuto Lumière introduces a pedagogy of attention, presence, and contemplation. The exercise invites students to step outside themselves and see the world—and, in doing so, to rediscover themselves.
"In a time saturated with images and immediate stimuli, we propose the use of the cell phone as a gesture of deceleration, listening, and attention—a reversal: the cell phone as an instrument of conscious inscription in the lived space and not of alienation from it.”
New Partnership – Periferias Dibujadas
Periferias Dibujadas is an “unlikely observatory” of urban transformations and conflicts, focusing on the voices and interventions of children. Based on tried and tested pedagogy, it addresses global dynamics through local interventions. Children learn the tools they need to become researchers of their immediate urban context through multimodal ethnography and art. In collaboration with countless children, as well as artists, educators, and researchers, this initiative has developed projects at the intersection of urban research and community art in neighborhoods such as Albayzín (Granada), Anjos (Lisbon), and Barra (Naples), among others.
The collection and (re)interpretation of local knowledge and cultural practices in the neighborhood are carried out with children as researchers and creators, through walks, interviews with neighbors and merchants, affective mapping, using multimodal methods: drawings, collages, comics, audio, video, stop motion, and collective maps as tools for exploration and expression.
The collaboration with Cinalfama manifests itself in two ways:
Starting this year, a section will be included in the Cinalfama festival that focuses children's gaze on their urban context and beyond. Curated by periferias dibujadas, films made by children or in collaboration with children will be screened. These sessions, dedicated to all ages, aim to draw attention to the importance of understanding children's perspective, gaze, and knowledge of the city they inhabit. The other strand, more long-term, is a collaboration that also involves APPA - Associação do Património e da População de Alfama (Alfama Heritage and Population Association) - to implement a collaborative research process with children, also in the Alfama area.