A new international film festival, part of Ponta Delgada’s year as Portuguese Capital of Culture, will celebrate the ocean as memory, inspiration, and a bridge between peoples. With 387 submissions from 81 countries, world premieres, emerging filmmakers and creative industry initiatives, CINE NOSSO promises five days of cinema across São Miguel.
The Atlantic has always been a storyteller. Its waters have carried the dreams of emigrants, the uncertainties of departure, the promises of return and the countless human encounters that have shaped the identities of islands and continents. It is a geography of distance, but also an immense archive of memory, where the lives of those who remained and those who departed continue to meet. This December, that ocean will become the central character of a new cinematic celebration in the Azores, as CINE NOSSO invites filmmakers and audiences to discover the stories that emerge from its shores, its crossings and its inexhaustible imagination.
Presented this week as part of Ponta Delgada – Portuguese Capital of Culture 2026 (PDL26), CINE NOSSO will take place from December 9 to 13, with its principal activities centered at Arquipélago – Contemporary Arts Center, in Ribeira Grande, and additional programming throughout São Miguel. The festival was introduced at the Public Library and Regional Archive of Ponta Delgada by Luís Filipe Borges, curator of Audiovisual and Cinema for PDL26, and Terry Costa, the festival’s producer and a leading figure at MiratecArts. PDL26 Commissioner Kátia Guerreiro and several local filmmakers joined them, reflecting an initiative that seeks to bring international cinema into conversation with the island’s own creative community.
At the heart of the festival is an understanding of the sea as something far greater than a physical boundary. As Luís Filipe Borges observed, the same ocean that separates communities also connects them. It carried those who emigrated, and their stories continue to return across its waters. From one shore to another, peoples who may never have encountered one another nevertheless recognize common experiences of departure, arrival, longing and belonging. This poetic conception of the Atlantic provides the festival with both its thematic foundation and its wider cultural ambition: to explore how cinema can illuminate the human relationships that geography sometimes conceals.
The international filmmaking community has already responded remarkably. CINE NOSSO received 387 submissions from 81 countries, all engaging with the sea as subject, memory, setting or destination. The initiative draws inspiration from the former Mostra Atlântica de Televisão (Atlantic Television Showcase), known as MAT. It seeks to recover something of the pioneering spirit associated with José Lopes de Araújo, who led that earlier event. A jury is now selecting works for two school screenings and five sessions open to the general public, bringing diverse cinematic interpretations of the ocean to Azorean audiences.
While the international selection will provide a window onto filmmaking from around the world, the festival will also give particular prominence to local production. Six short films will form a program entitled PDL Coisa de Linda, celebrating cinematic perspectives connected to Ponta Delgada. Four documentaries will receive their world premieres, while a feature-length fiction film will be presented in an exclusive Azorean preview. Together, these presentations aim to place local filmmakers alongside international voices, demonstrating that the islands are not merely subjects to be portrayed by others but places from which original cinematic narratives continue to emerge.
CINE NOSSO also intends to move beyond conventional film screenings. Its program includes the Açor Awards, masterclasses, a pitching competition, screenplay support and a Location Hunt initiative, with activities distributed across São Miguel. These components suggest an interest in nurturing filmmaking as both a creative practice and a professional field, encouraging new projects, supporting emerging talent, and highlighting the islands’ potential as locations for audiovisual production.
The educational dimension is particularly important. By dedicating screenings to schools, the festival recognizes that cinema is not only entertainment but also a means of developing cultural literacy, imagination and critical understanding. Films about the sea can open conversations about migration, environmental change, history, identity and the relationships between communities separated by vast distances. For young Azoreans, whose lives are inseparable from the Atlantic even when they rarely reflect upon its broader significance, such encounters offer an opportunity to see their geographical circumstances through the perspectives of filmmakers from other parts of the world.
The festival also reflects the cultural ambition tied to Ponta Delgada’s designation as Portuguese Capital of Culture. Throughout 2026, the initiative has sought to create opportunities for artistic participation, strengthen cultural networks, and connect the Azores with institutions beyond the archipelago. CINE NOSSO supports that objective by bringing international work to São Miguel while giving local artists greater visibility and opportunities for professional exchange. Its significance will depend not only on the December screenings, but also on the relationships and projects that may continue afterward.
MiratecArts, with Terry Costa directing the festival’s production in collaboration with Luís Filipe Borges, brings to the initiative an established commitment to cultural programming and artistic exchange. The partnership reflects a broader recognition that island culture’s vitality depends on both developing local talent and creating meaningful opportunities for that talent to participate in international conversations.
An Atlantic film festival in the Azores feels especially appropriate. Few places understand so intimately the contradictions of the ocean: its beauty and danger, its capacity to isolate and connect, its role in sustaining livelihoods and carrying people toward unknown futures. For centuries, islanders have looked toward the horizon and imagined what might exist beyond it. Cinema, in its own way, begins with a similar gesture—an invitation to look beyond what is immediately visible and enter another person’s world.
CINE NOSSO proposes to transform that gesture into five days of shared discovery. Its 387 submissions from 81 countries suggest the extraordinary variety of stories that can emerge from a single universal element. The sea may appear differently in each film, but its presence offers a common language through which distinct experiences can meet.
From December 9 to 13, São Miguel will become a gathering place for those stories, bringing the Atlantic onto the screen while inviting audiences to reconsider the ocean outside the theater doors.
Because the sea does not merely divide the world’s shores, it carries the memories, images, and voices through which distant peoples may come to recognize one another. And when those stories find their way to the cinema, the ocean becomes not an ending, but the beginning of another journey.
Further information and program updates are available at cinenosso.com, as well as through the festival’s Facebook and Instagram pages.
Based on a Press release from MiratecArts, Terry Costa, director. The images are also from MiratecArts.