On December 4, 2016, the 3rd Porto/Post/Doc came to an end. There were nine intense days, with a hundred films and several other events, such as concerts, debates, Q&As and parties.

The cultural turmoil of these days, the different publics that came to our spaces, make us believe that we conquered the city. We surpassed 10 thousand spectators, with an average of 100 spectators per session and including several sold out screenings. There is, therefore, an audience for cinema in Porto. A diverse audience, curious, thought-provoking and very young that makes us project a promising future. The festival also grew as a professional platform, bringing together a large group of guests. There were more than 200 who passed through Porto, including directors and producers of films in competition and the different sections; the national and international press; and other festivals and national and international organizations.

Since its inception Porto/Post/Doc has made a commitment to create and educate new audiences through the School Trip educational project. Aware of the scarcity of audiences in the city's cinemas, we seek to educate for and through cinema, filling a gap in educational projects in this area and, with initiatives close to the youth, take cinema to schools and students to theaters. This year, we went further, creating the Mini, a space dedicated to a child and youth audience, promoting workshops, sessions and film classes for children and adolescents. We involved schools and we got promising adehesion.

In 2016, we dedicated two Focus. With the Sensory Ethnography Lab, we put sensory cinema as the center of the festival. Through their films, but also of their choice of Jana Sevcíková, we went to new territories. The Forum of the Real, we also sought to discuss the theme, with three panels with speakers from different areas. We also show, with an integral retrospective, Eryk Rocha and his poetic cinema, in which he reinvents the look on the Brazilian reality.

In this edition of the festival, we reinforce the identity of Porto/Post/Doc. We are a frontier festival, which defies genre conventions and promotes new and daring films. However, as we have seen in both the winning films and the competition, as in the films that the festival has uncovered - from the Sensory Ethnography Lab, to Jana Sevcíková or Eryk Rocha - cinema is also a political weapon: a weapon against oblivion and for the dignity of the human being. This will also continue to be a mark of Porto/Post/Doc.

In the coming months we will continue our regular exhibition activity, through the cycles program of Há Filmes na Baixa!, in Passos Manuel. We will also give continuity to our educational project, reinforcing the ties of the festival with the schools of the region, from the kids to the university education.

For us, to have a festival is to participate in the public space, to rescue the memory and to provoke the debate. We are a space of encounter, of creativity and of cultural agitation. We are tired, but happy. We make a festival with passion and we want this passion shared with the public. It is with this audience that we can be better.

See you next year!