Travel has always been, and still is, a foundational gesture of the human condition. Humanity was built through movement: out of necessity, desire, survival, or discovery. Journeys reveal us as much as they can transform us — they are escapes, but also rediscoveries; they are quests for freedom, yet also confrontations with the limits of our world and that of others. In this symbolic crossing we propose, cinema emerges as a place of passage and encounter, as both mirror and border to be crossed.

The cycle The Time of a Journey extends the program The Movement of People, which began in 2024 with Europe Does Not Exist, I’ve Been There, and will conclude in 2026 with The Country of Others. With this program, Porto/Post/Doc reaffirms its commitment to a cinema that thinks about the time we live in, in connection with the Forum do Real and other reflective and dialogical activities within the festival. A cinema that reveals, that thinks, and that acts upon the present. A cinema that seeks to understand better, and that, in revealing, proposes action and doing better.

This program frames and suggests a deep look at the act of departure: not as a narrative motif, but as a structural gesture of contemporary societies. Films that cross geographies and temporalities — from Poland to Afghanistan, from Turkey to the Algerian desert — portraying subjects who, by necessity or choice, inhabit the space between places. While the classic "road movie" spoke of escape and individual discovery, these films look at displacement within a specific time and space of conflict, oppression, and resistance.

Five films, five ways of interrogating the forms of forced and voluntary movement that mark our time. Through archival images, Trains by Maciej Drygas emerges as an ambivalent symbol of escape, war, deportation, and flight, reflecting the horrors and hopes of the 20th century. In Midnight Traveler by Hassan Fazil, an Afghan family documents, with their mobile phones, the harrowing journey through several countries as they flee war and political persecution. With Yol – The Full Version, we present the newly restored and complete version of the film written by Yilmaz Güney and directed by Serif Gören, recovering the original vision of this essential work on resistance and survival under the Turkish regime. In one of his most intimate documentaries (Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin), Werner Herzog retraces the steps of his friend, writer Bruce Chatwin, in a poetic reflection on nomadism, friendship, and cultural destruction through tourism. Hassen Ferhani films, in 143 Desert Street, a remote teahouse in the desert where a unique woman, Malika, welcomes travelers whose fleeting encounters reveal the strength of real cinema as a mirror of humanity.

In a time when mobility is celebrated for some and denied to many others, this cycle proposes a change in perspective: to look at travel not as an exception, but as the rule. Not as metaphor, but as concrete matter, questioning easy narratives, fixed maps, rigid concepts of identity and belonging. In this edition, we invite the audience to take these journeys with us — not to find definitive answers, but to open space for what is essential: listening, questioning, and recognizing the other, in a movement that is vital and never-ending.

PROGRAMME

143 Sahara Street
Hassen Ferhani · Algeria, France, Qatar· 2019 · DOC 100'
Trailer

Midnight Traveller 
Hassan Fazili · USA, Qatar · 2019 · DOC · 88'
Trailer

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
Werner Herzog · United Kingdom · 2019 · DOC · 85'
Trailer

Trains
Maciej Drygas · Poland · 2024 · DOC, EXP · 81'
Trailer

Yol – The Full Version
Serif Gören & Yilmaz Güney · Switzerland · 1982/2022 · FIC · 110'
Trailer