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( urban age )

submit your film here
26.09 – 02.11.2025



How can film help us reflect on the urban age we inhabit, and on the ways cities and territories are shaped by today’s social, political, and environmental challenges?

The 13th edition of the Arquiteturas Film Festival, themed “Urban Age”, turns its attention to the lived experience of urbanisation – from the material forms of architecture to the social and cultural dynamics that define contemporary cities.

This edition seeks films that explore the many dimensions of urban life: housing, infrastructure, public space, informality, environmental change, and social reproduction. We are interested in works that expose the contradictions of the city as a space of both opportunity and exclusion, solidarity and conflict, precarity and imagination. At a time when urbanisation permeates nearly every aspect of life, we must look beyond inherited conceptions of the city as a bounded settlement and engage with broader patterns of the urban.

The festival invites cinematic practices that highlight the embodied, emotional, and political dimensions of urbanisation – engaging with questions of race, class, gender, and ecology to rethink what it means to live together in the urban age.

We welcome diverse perspectives on film and architecture that resonate with this year’s theme, “Urban Age”. Submissions are open to films of any kind – documentary, fiction, or experimental – and of any duration, short or feature-length. An interdisciplinary committee will curate the programme in collaboration with the festival’s organiser, INSTITUTO.

Films must be submitted via Film Freeway by 2 November 2025. Alongside film screenings, the festival will host talks, tours, and installations, creating opportunities for in-depth discussion around the themes and research behind the films.

The Arquiteturas Film Festival will take place from 1–4 July 2026 in Porto, Portugal. Organised by INSTITUTO and directed by architect Paulo Moreira, the festival was founded in 2013 and has since become a platform for debating and disseminating architecture in dialogue with the visual and spatial arts, critical thought, and interdisciplinary collaborations.