Amongst the different activities promoted by Journeying the Screen we include six screening sessions. Their central goal is to stimulate the public to answer the survey we are conducting in each of the sessions, aimed at measuring the impact of the films on the audience. In the very last session a second survey will be distributed asking those who accept to participate to evaluate which of the six movies was most significant when deciding on a possible holiday destination.

With this in mind and with the experienced support of Tomar’s Cinema Society programmer team, six films were chosen. The first one, a more obvious road movie, in a comical tone The Trip to Italy (2014), by Michael Winterbottom - as a means to begin this cycle and engage a broader audience.

The second screening took us to a more melancholic and slow register, that of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016). The well acclaimed documentary of Agnés Varda and JR, Faces, Places (2017), was our third choice, whose theme coincidentally matches our own project -- the renewal and re-empowerment of rural areas, with fewer services, a major tendency towards population decline and low tourism activity. This screening was accompanied by the initial words of the social scientist Paulo Peixoto, who tore down the prejudice on these territories and underlined their potential by inviting the audience to look at them through a creative and productive lens.

On a totally different tone we chose to follow with the dark humor comedy Sightseers (2012), of British director Ben Wheatley as our fourth screening. This choice of a contrasting picture between the beautiful pastoral landscape of northern England and the macabre aesthetics of the narrative- aims at understanding what impact does it have among the audience.

Despite the fact that the theme of the journey is present in all of the cycle’s films, we decided to emphasize that trait with the fifth screening, which focuses on theme of the inward journey into one’s self. The chosen film was Ken Kwapis’s A Walk in the Woods (2015) and the guest commentator was Prof. Madalena Teixeira who called the audience’s attention to the recurrent topos of the journey in the history of humanity and to its metaphorical representation of people’s search for identity. In other words, each individual’s journey is a self-knowledge process.

 

To end this cinema cycle we have selected Beyond the Road (2010) by the Brazilian director Charly Braun. A road movie which took the audience through Uruguayan landscapes as well as through the movie road tradition. The initial remarks were carried out by the Film Studies and road movie specialist José Duarte, who guided the audience through the symbolism of the several stages of the journey taken by the two main characters.

 

As a way of involving students in this activity, first year students of the BA degree in Culture and Tourism Management (GTC) were invited to write a small essay on the film that was attributed to them and to dissert on the film’s relevance to the field of tourism. These essays can be read in the section Students’ Projects of this blog. Moreover, as a way to stimulate people to watch films in a theater with a proper cinema screen, we established that all members of the IPT community (students and staff) should have free entrance to every session of this cycle. This way we were able to get people who rarely went to the cinema, to make it a more regular habit. Furthermore, we also believe that we have boosted the value of Tomar’s Cinema Society cultural contribution to the city by giving more visibility to its work and by making a part of the local community realize its existence.