A Festival Journey Down Memory Lane

“I am for curiosity in every direction. I find that a man without curiosity is a dead branch. And curiosity, starting from film, can mean going beyond the film, not stopping at the film itself, but moving toward an understanding of a country, a history, a society, geography, psychology… even dreams, customs, a whole host of things! One stumbles upon all sorts of fascinating discoveries when one conceives of cinema not as an art enclosed in itself.”

— Jean-Loup Passek

Melgaço – the first time I heard the name of this small town in the north of Portugal was in the 1980s during the La Rochelle Film Festival. In a conversation, someone mentioned that the founder and director of the festival, legendary film critic and writer Jean-Loup Passek, had chosen this hidden corner of Portugal as his second home.

I had discovered the La Rochelle Film festival when I started writing about cinema, and for more than a decade it became my annual festival highlight. Its unique ambience came closest to my ideal of a film festival – a celebration of cinema that opened wide the windows to the world and “to the past, the present and maybe even the future,” as Passek put it, where audiences and filmmakers from all borders could mingle freely in a joyous and informal atmosphere. And for me, as a journalist, it was like paradise in those days. It was easy to just meet and talk over a coffee with filmmakers like Theo Angelopoulos, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Darius Mehrjui or Humberto Solas…

Passek’s vision for La Rochelle was radical in its simplicity. He imagined a festival without juries, without awards, without the usual choreography of prestige that dominates Cannes, Venice, or Berlin. La Rochelle was never about winning. To him, cinema was a vast landscape where the most important task was not to crown one film over another but to allow works to echo, to clash, to resonate across decades and geographies.

When I was invited to join the Melgaço Documentary Film Festival as a FIPRESCI juror, I was overwhelmed with excitement. I carried with me not just curiosity for a new festival that I was about to discover, but also the feeling that this journey would turn into a kind of time travel down my memory lane.

I met Passek in La Rochelle over the years, sometimes in passing, sometimes in informal conversations. He was not an easy man: uncompromising in taste, uninterested in diplomacy, and often resistant to the “mundane” Parisian cinema world. Yet his programming at La Rochelle shaped me profoundly as a journalist. At a time when most festival directors already bowed to the pressures of distributors, funding bodies, and political correctness, Passek held firm to a fiercely personal vision. His idea of a festival was not about competition, prizes, or prestige — it was about comparison, dialogue, and curiosity. A place of resistance.

Walking through his programming felt like entering a dialogue between times and places: an obscure Soviet silent could sit alongside a Portuguese documentary, a forgotten American melodrama next to the latest work from Eastern Europe. He created constellations rather than hierarchies. For the audience, this meant discovery — the thrill of seeing a film not as an isolated object but as part of a larger conversation. For filmmakers, it meant freedom from the anxiety of prizes and juries, and the chance to be appreciated on their own terms.

What struck me most about Passek was how little he cared for compromise. His selections were unapologetically personal, not designed to please sponsors, to meet quotas, or to echo the political mood of the day. Passek refused that dance. They were a reflection of his own taste, his own sense of curiosity about cinema’s history and geography.

I remember one occasion when he was confronted about the near absence of films by women in that year’s La Rochelle programme. The question was asked with a sharp edge, as if to expose a blind spot. Passek did not flinch. His answer was immediate, almost brusque: “If I find a film by a woman director that fits my criteria, I will of course include it. But I didn’t find any. There are simply not that many great female directors.”

Nowadays, he would have been immediately crucified in public. But for me his answer showed his absolute loyalty to his own standards, his refusal to bend for appearances’ sake. To me, that moment also crystallised the paradox of Passek: a man of immense curiosity, open to the world’s cinemas, yet also resistant, even dismissive, when challenged outside the framework of his own convictions.

This uncompromising approach, however, also set him apart, and the Parisian cinema “family” — that circle of critics, programmers, distributors and cultural officials who thrive on compromise and conviviality — sometimes found him ‘difficult’. Yet for those of us who followed his work, the integrity of his vision was a model of what cinema culture could be, even if it clashed with the mundane realities of institutions and funding bodies.

MDOC, the Festival Internacional de Documentário de Melgaço, founded in 2014 — two years before Passek died, and organised by the O Norte Association and the Municipality of Melgaço — focuses on social and ethnographic cinema that reflects topics such as identity, memory, and borders. With three competition sections, the festival is structured totally differently from Passek’s original ideas, and it felt somehow strange, almost ironic, that the main award even bears his name.

Taking part as a juror was for me an exciting and rich experience, not only for its programme, which gave me the opportunity to discover some outstanding documentaries I had missed, but also for the overwhelmingly warm and convivial atmosphere the organisers created for their guests — including daily excursions to Melgaço’s historical sites, its famous wineries, and its striking natural beauty along the Minho river.

But MDOC is not only about screenings and awards. Its thematic focus on social, individual and cultural issues related to identity, memory and borders is also reflected in the two residency programmes on film and photography organised during the festival. They aim to contribute to an audiovisual archive of Melgaço’s immaterial heritage, producing works that reflect the history, identity, and memory of the region. The resulting creations are intended for the Espaço Memória e Fronteira, preserving local stories and experiences while linking contemporary filmmaking to the village’s social and cultural fabric. In this way, the festival carries elements of Passek’s curiosity and engagement with place into a concrete form — even if the competitive framework contradicts his ideas.

The Museu de Cinema de Melgaço – Jean-Loup Passek, inaugurated in June 2005 by the then Minister of Culture, and located in the heart of the town’s historic centre remains the most powerful tribute to him. With its two exhibitions — one permanent and one temporary — it is a living testament to Passek’s dream of a “sentimental museum”, not simply a shrine to objects, but a living space of imagination and education. Besides his impressive collection of thousands of film posters, photographs, books and other documents that Passek had gifted to the municipality Melgaço, its amazing permanent exhibition also celebrates cinema’s origins. Walking through the museum’s rooms — past magic lanterns, phenakistoscopes, zoetropes, and the fragile hand-painted glass slides , I felt once again the sense of wonder Passek sought to preserve: cinema as curiosity, discovery, and dream.. These objects are not just relics of pre-cinema; they are fragments of imagination, illusions of motion that remind us how cinema began as a game of discovery beyond the frame.

During the festival, the museum also opened a striking temporary exhibition: “Iron Tears 39/45 – War Films from Eastern Countries.” It explores how, under dictatorship and censorship, filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Wajda, Rostotsky Munk or Holland transformed cinema into acts of resistance and historical reflechon. The posters and images evoke not only the weight of history but the resilience of human creahvity — a hmely reminder that cinema can be invenhon, illusion, and defiance all at once.

Passek did not arrive in Melgaço by accident. His connection to this northern Portuguese village began during the 70s in the Parisian suburbs, where he befriended António Souto and António Alves, two Portuguese immigrants who had left in search of work. They invited him back to their home in Melgaço, and he came — not by plane, for he famously avoided air travel, but by road in his Citroën Dyane. These friendships developed into a deep and lasting bond with Portugal — so much so that Portugal became, in his own words, “a second homeland.”

At the festival’s closing ceremony, the documentary L’homme du cinéma by José Vieira, commissioned by the mayor of Melgaço and following Passek’s footsteps between La Rochelle and Melgaço, was projected outdoors against the ruins of the fortress. It opens with the Citroën Dyane rolling through Galicia toward this sleepy little border town, nestled in bucolic hills with its vineyards and forests in the Minho valley. Watching it, I thought of my own journey: I too had driven from France, in my camper van, lemng the landscapes unfold slowly, feeling that the road itself was part of the experience.

In Melgaço, two museums face each other like mirrors. On one side, the Museu de Cinema Jean-Loup Passek; on the other, the Museum of Emigration, documenting the Portuguese exodus northward, especially to France, in search of work. Two museums, two worlds, yet deeply connected: it was through emigrants that Passek first came to Melgaço, and it is through Melgaço that his legacy now has a home.

This duality — between cinema and migration, between the universal and the local, between discovery and exile — feels like the truest homage to him. Not the prize bearing his name but the anchoring of his life’s work in a place shaped by journeys, departures, and arrivals. For a man who saw cinema as a passage to other histories, other geographies, other dreams, there could be no more fitting home.

By Barbara Lorey de Lacharriere
Edited by José Teodoro
Copyright FIPRECI