ZOOM OUT/ZOOM IN ON THE DIGITAL SOCIAL NETWORKS OF THE PORTUGUESE NATIONAL FILM PLAN: A view in pandemic times

ABSTRACT

The interest in the potential of cinema as extensible to the scope of education dates back to the beginning of the seventh art and has followed the evolution of society. In line with this vision, the Portuguese National Film Plan (PNFP) emerges nowadays as a government program for film literacy among school audiences, awakening in young people the habit of watching cinema and valuing it as an art. This essay has the purpose of taking a look at the presence of the PNFP on digital social networks during the closure of schools decreed for Portugal as one of the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Characterized by in-presence and collective activities, the Plan faced the impossibility of developing them as before, since the school space was transferred to online settings. We observed that pandemic times have come to reveal some of the virtues of the new media and ways of living the cinema, which, not excluding others, are a contribution to the future of the relationship between cinema and education, a dynamic that the PNFP has been developing. We conclude that social web tools such as the digital social networks can be a valid asset for the Plan, in a virtualization that is complementary to its physical presence in schools.