About

Despite the very positive achievements of environmental education in recent years, it is recognized that there is widespread environmental illiteracy among the Portuguese and that they participate very little in initiatives related to the environment. But given the complexity of today's challenges to maintain life on the planet, growing global social inequalities and the paradoxes of sustainable development,  the environment does not suffice per si.

It is also important to develop an ecological reading about our everyday actions. Ecological, of ecology, of the Greek oikos, meaning "home", and logos, which means "study." That is, we need to cultivate the "study of the place where we live," the places we inhabit, and our intimate connection with everything we do: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the water we waste, the energy we use to do all these things. What are the immediate and distant consequences of these small-scale acts? Between beliefs and habits, the contradictions of mercantile culture and consumption reproduce, they are transmitted from generation to generation, and thus the impacts of our actions are concealed.

More than ever before, much information is available today. What seems scarce are opportunities to critically discuss it and to understand the meaning it assumes for our day-to-day life. There is an urgent need to create common, communitarian spaces where we can put into dialogue what concerns us, imagine other futures and, step by step, construct them collectively, creatively mobilizing the resources we have at the local level.

ParaDocma, of PARAdigm, of DOCumentary and DOgMA, is an initiative that brings together several groups and local organisations, an Itinerant Cinema Series that will journey through the city of Coimbra with the aim of promoting the “study of the home”, in this case, producing dialogue on pressing ecological issues in various spaces of the city of Coimbra. It is a travelling event because it intends to disseminate the associative spaces and the public spaces of the city to the population and, thus, to know the local material and immaterial resources.

This third edition of ParaDocma, an initiative jointly organised by Casa da Esquina, the Coimbra em Transição (CeT) Association, Cine Eco Seia and the Ecology and Society Workshop of the Centre for Social Studies/UC with other local organisations. We have the privilege of having Cine Eco Seia, the main environmental film festival in Portugal, as a partner and having free screening rights to award-winning films in Coimbra. In this edition, the sessions will be mainly at Casa da Esquina and between January and June 2019 there will be at least two sessions in two other venues, with at least one outdoor session. In this edition, the sessions will be mainly at Casa da Esquina and in Spring-Summer, May-June-July we will co-build festival sessions with people, communities and associations from the city's peripheries (Bairros da Rosa, Ingote and Relvinha).