Submissions for the 13th Montanha Pico Festival and the Azorean Audiovisual Awards close October 1, ahead of the January 2027 festival. From international films shaped by mountain landscapes to audiovisual work created by Azoreans, the two calls seek to bring new images and new voices to Pico.

Mountains have always invited people to look upward; cinema asks us to look differently. On Pico, those two gestures meet each January through the Montanha Pico Festival, whose 13th edition will take place in January 2027. Filmmakers have until Thursday, October 1, to submit works for the festival competition, while Azorean creators face the same deadline for the Prémios Audiovisuais Açorianos (PAA), the Azorean Audiovisual Awards.

“These are two opportunities in the audiovisual sector that are still open,” explains artistic director Terry Costa. For the international festival, films from anywhere in the world are welcome provided mountains form part of their theme or setting. For Azorean creators, the field is deliberately broader: music videos, advertising, institutional and corporate productions, documentaries and fiction can all be submitted, without genre restrictions, both for consideration within the festival and for the Azorean Audiovisual Awards. Producers, filmmakers, audiovisual companies and individual artists may submit directly through , while films can also be entered through FilmFreeway.

Several special presentations have already been announced. Portuguese filmmaker João Botelho will participate in the opening, while Honeyjoon, the American feature by Lilian T. Mehrel filmed in the Azores, will bring another cinematic interpretation of the islands to the program. The festival has also confirmed Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains, scheduled for Saturday, January 9, at 10 p.m. at the Madalena Auditorium. The film, which received seven Edda Awards from the Icelandic Film and Television Academy, including Best Film and Best Director, follows a family through a year as the parents navigate separation, placing the bittersweet persistence of love and shared memory against Iceland’s mountainous landscape and changing seasons.

That pairing of landscape and human experience lies naturally within the spirit of a festival held beneath Portugal’s highest mountain. Pico is more than a backdrop: it gives the festival its visual vocabulary. By simultaneously opening itself to mountain cinema from around the world and creating space for Azorean audiovisual production in virtually all its forms, the event allows the island to become both screen and window—a place from which Azoreans look outward and through which filmmakers from elsewhere enter the archipelago.

Additional announcements and programming are available through Montanha Pico Festival and its official Facebook page, where the festival has also shared a film trailer.

For now, the important date is October 1—the moment when the doors close on submissions and the work of assembling another festival begins.

And then, in January, the lights will dim in Madalena, the screen will illuminate, and beneath the great mountain of Pico, other mountains—and other human lives—will begin to rise before us.