An entire generation became politically engaged - effervescent, convinced that it too would play a decisive role in the revolution. Was it not the task of youth to ignite the spark of great transformations? They drew on the heroic imagery of the Cuban Revolution, the myth of Che Guevara, and the rallying cry “Power to the Imagination!” from May 1968.

By 1980, disillusionment had set in over the course the country had taken and what was seen as the dismantling of April’s achievements - the re-privatization of factories, the end of agrarian reform. After several attempts by the far right to regain power (two coup attempts in 1974 and 1975, and more than 600 attacks and violent actions between 1975 and 1977), fears that fascism might return grew. In this post-celebratory hangover, in this climate of tension and anxiety, a far-left armed group emerges. Between 1980 and 1986, the country becomes the stage for bombings, armed robberies, and politically motivated executions. The Popular Forces of April 25 (FP-25) cause the deaths of at least eighteen people - four of them militants - and wound dozens more, leaving Portuguese society deeply shaken.

As a child, I practically lived at the Comuna Theater, where my parents were actors. One day in 1984, a car arrived and two men who clearly did not belong to that world stepped out. They approached my aunt, and before they even spoke, she said to the police officers: “I’ve had my bag packed in the trunk of the car for six months. There’s no need to go by my house.” They took her away under arrest, and I only saw her again in prison. My parents explained that other people we knew might also be detained. “Don’t worry,” they said, “we have no connection to the organization and we don’t support it. In a democracy, if you want power, you go to elections, like all the bastards.” My aunt’s car stayed there, abandoned, parked outside the theater, slowly rusting away.

The FP-25 were contemporaries of the Baader-Meinhof, ETA, the IRA, or Action Directe; but without a territorial or identitarian cause to frame them, they remain difficult to understand.

In 2026, Portuguese society - like the world’s population in general - is deeply polarized and far removed from the transformative energy that once animated April 25 or May ’68. In this fatigued present, it is difficult to revisit a group that saw itself as a “maintenance army.” Projecto Global revisits that time through the eyes of men and women driven by the conviction that resisting the return of fascism was not only necessary, but inevitable. In truth, fascism never returned - at least for the time being.

The film depicts the violent actions that terrorized Portugal: operational successes, tragic mistakes, fear of betrayal, expectations, comradeship, the loss of an ideological and moral compass, and the opportunism that defines the paths of our anti-heroes. Many scenes - adapted from real events recounted by former operatives - border on the burlesque, were this not a distinctly Portuguese reality, marked by improvisation.

Projecto Global speaks of a dream of equality from which one is forced to awaken, and of the difficulty of accepting defeat when ideas collide with reality - made up of compromises, interests, pettiness, and renunciations. We swing between the euphoria of wanting to change the world and creeping despair.

Artistic works about the movements that swept across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s can help us understand the continent’s contemporary history. I am interested in what they share with today’s movements, including peaceful protests, with which they share the same sense of revolt.

Like Letters from War (2016), Projecto Global contains violence, a political dimension, and memories that are difficult to confront. I believe the film can help soothe some of the wounds that remain open.

In the cinema of the 1970s, which I have always loved, there was room for moral ambivalence, for contradictory characters, for stories in which the spectator was invited to construct meaning for themselves. Projecto Global seeks that freedom: to observe without judging, to film without explaining everything, to allow doubt - and not certainty - to be at the center of the narrative, trusting that the spectator knows reality rarely fits into a single, simple gesture.

We worked the camera with the same energy as the bodies: running after them, following the impulse of the moment, allowing imperfection in - mirroring the characters’ own mistakes. We didn’t want to get ahead of them, but to let them guide us, as if the film had to learn to breathe with them.

The point of view is critical, of course, but also suffused with tenderness. I like them, despite the deeply inhumane errors that I do not understand and that enrage me. Contradiction is part of the characters - it is part of this film, and of life itself.

With Projecto Global, I aim for a cinema that fights to maintain an inner vitality, a cinema of impulse, failure, and rupture. That is precisely what I worked on with the actors: error as method, hesitation as truth. This is not a film that simplifies, because it could not be - or we did not want it to be - didactic.

That tension between the utopia one longs for and the mistakes made in its pursuit is the moral heart of Projecto Global.

Ivo M. Ferreira