Cristina Teixeira, an animation teacher and a jury member at Cinanima looks for charme in the competing films. Courtesy of and © Cinanima.

Before leaving for Espinho, I compared the list of films in competition at Espinho with those that made the Ottawa International Animation Festival ‘05. Only three films apparently made both festivals. The rest of the Cinanima list I had never seen before. I left Ottawa on a blistery, cold day completely intrigued.

In order to understand the Cinanima selection and to uncover its flavor, we need some backstory. This is not a simple tale of enthusiasm for a modest art form. At the heart of the festival is a team comprised of many determined individuals including Antonio Gaio, director for the last 25 years. Now in his 80s, his influence still commands tremendous respect among the new generation of young Portuguese directors. And there is a very good reason for it.

In 1928, the ruling democratic republic of Portugal was thrust aside by the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled the country with an iron fist for forty years. This was no benign dictatorship. Artists and intellectuals were arrested, imprisoned, tortured and murdered without legitimate cause. The PIDE, Salazar’s secret political police, raided homes and meetings searching for those who dared to criticize the government.

U.K.'s Lucy Lee won the Best Animation in a European Film award for her work The Gates of Heaven. Unless otherwise indicated, all images courtesy of Sharon Katz.

In the 1960s, in this terrifying atmosphere, the young Antonio Gaio along with others ran the Cine Clube of Espinho. Many of the screenings were shut down by the PIDE, but Gaio persevered in showing films. Animated shorts were particularly sought out, especially those from eastern Europe, because while on the surface they looked innocent enough to get past the PIDE, they were actually subversive films with powerful political messages for those who could read them.

In addition to rigidly imposing his dictatorship on the people of Portugal, Salazar kept his military tied up policing the Portuguese African colony of Angola. Young men were carted off to fight a war that had no meaning for them; artists, intellectuals and journalists lived in terror of arrest; everyone dreamed of freedom. Underground the news spread throughout the country: when a particular song is played on the radio, it will be the signal to begin the overthrow of the government, to march on Lisbon. On April 25, 1974, the armed forces, backed by the people, overthrew the dictatorship in a bloodless coup and established democracy.

The mission of the festival, according to Pedro Perez, a long-time member of the organizing team, is to “receive the people well.”

Immediately after the revolution Antonio Gaio and others became involved in the creation of a cultural cooperative, Nascente. In the early years the organization put out a newspaper; ran a theatre, a cooperative supermarket, a library, a choral group, and… Cinanima. At first taking on the role of editor of the newspaper, Gaio quickly returned to his first love, the drawn image, and two years after its establishment became the director of Cinanima. Initially a showcase for cartoons and comic books, in 1977 it screened a retrospective of animated films from the Czech Republic.

The 1986 Cinanima catalogue has a wonderful introduction by Alves Costa describing the founding of the festival and a conversation he had with a German festival director who was very skeptical that they could successfully get the funding and organization together to create an international animation festival in small, out-of-the-way Espinho.

“That is the way things are done in Germany… quite professional … but we are in Portugal. We are poor, we have to (pass over) many needs with a certain dose of daring, with a lot of voluntary effort and some wit… But you’ll see that, with a lot less financial and human resources, and even with a precarious organization (my interlocutor seemed pessimistic) the project will go ahead.” My interlocutor was repeating: “It isn’t possible… give up this madness.” He wasn’t smiling any longer. And he meant every word. I kept my smile and insisted, “You’ll see how wrong you are. The first Cinanima will happen. The Portuguese way. And it will be good. You’ll see.”