Aldeias com Futuro

The project

Aldeias com Futuro is a 22-episode authorial documentary series — one episode for every parish of the Castelo Branco municipality — directed by Luís Agostinho and produced by ALBIGEC, the municipality's wholly publicly-owned cultural company. It is, in effect, a portrait of an entire territory told village by village: a contemporary cinematic reading of the Portuguese interior.

One village, one film

Each episode is a self-contained cinematic work organised around three layers. The first is origin and identity — the history, territory, legends and symbols that make a place itself. The second is contemporary life — the people, practices and rhythms of the village today. The third is a projection of the future — the challenges, opportunities and reinventions ahead. Filmed in 4K with long takes and close attention to atmosphere, the series deliberately steps away from both ethnographic inventory and tourism promotion.

The village as a living thing

Its guiding idea is to treat each village as a living cultural organism — autonomous, plural, and irreducible to a homogenised "rural world" — and to treat its communities as creative subjects rather than objects of study. The camera becomes a device of cultural mediation rather than mere observation, and the result is a series that takes the interior seriously on its own terms.

Why it matters

By covering all 22 parishes, the series gives the whole municipality equal standing — a deliberate act of cultural cohesion for a low-density interior territory where attention and investment are usually unevenly spread. It is directed by Luís Agostinho, a photographer and filmmaker from Covilhã with a long relationship to Beira Baixa and a 2024 ART&TUR Creativity Prize, and it is anchored by a municipal company rather than a private studio — place-based cultural creation, made in and for the territory it portrays.