where european cinema ended up at the edge of the world
Melgaço sits in the northernmost corner of Portugal, up against the Spanish border and surrounded by the Parque Nacional da Peneda-Gerês. It's here, in this municipality of fewer than ten thousand people, that there's a museum dedicated to a French film critic born in Boulogne-Billancourt.
The connection isn't arbitrary. Jean-Loup Passek spent years collecting and preserving objects linked to cinema, and part of that collection ended up in Melgaço. The museum is part of the Rede Melgaço Museus, which distributes several thematic centres across the town and surroundings, and occupies the former Cine Pelicano building, restored by the municipality.
who was Jean-Loup Passek
Passek was no ordinary critic. He directed the film collections at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, founded and led the Festival du Film de La Rochelle and created the Caméra d'Or Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the one that recognises a director's first feature. Bertrand Tavernier, one of the greatest French filmmakers, considered him one of the central figures in the history of cinema in his country. He died in Paris in December 2016.
The fact that his collection found its way to Melgaço says something about how Portugal sometimes holds onto what the major centres didn't want to keep.
what you'll find
- a collection tied to 20th-century European cinema
- a building with its own history, the former Cine Pelicano
- the surprise of finding this right here, at this extreme of the country
- a small town where the museum is part of a broader circuit through local memory
