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Given the complexity of the challenges that today jeopardise the maintenance of life on Planet Earth, the growing inequalities and social injustices, the advance of populism and extremism and the contradictions of so-called sustainable development, it is important to develop a “critical ecological reading” of the world. Ecological, from ecologia, from the Greek oikos, meaning “household”, and logos, meaning “study”. In other words, we need to cultivate the “study of the place where we live”, of the places we inhabit, and their intimate connection with the defence of life.

Decisions related to power dynamics, particularly those of economic elites, about what is produced in the food industry, which is the basis of our survival, which energy sources are used, the processes of combating diseases, the configuration of territories, in which more economic resources are invested.

What are the consequences, near and far in time and territory, and how can we react?

There is an urgent need to create more common, community spaces where we can discuss what concerns us, imagine other futures and, step by step, build them collectively, creatively mobilising the resources we have at local level to do, learn, fight and resist.
ParaDocma, from PARADigma, DOCumentário and DOgMA, is an initiative that brings together various local groups and organisations, a Film Series that wants to energise the city of Coimbra with the aim of promoting the “study of the household”, in this case, to create dialogue on pressing ecological issues in various spaces of the city of Coimbra. It is an itinerant event because it aims to divulge the associative spaces and public spaces of the city to the population and thus get to know the existing local material and immaterial resources.

Paradocma is an initiative organised jointly by Casa da Esquina, Cine Eco Seia and the Ecology and Society Lab of the Centre for Social Studies of the UC, in collaboration with other local organisations.  We are privileged to have Cine Eco Seia, Portugal's leading environmental film festival, as a partner and to have screening rights to award-winning films in Coimbra. In this edition, the screenings will be at Casa da Esquina and at Avelar Brotero Secondary School.