As part of CineEco—the Serra da Estrela International Environmental Film Festival—approximately 160 students from schools in the municipality of Seia participated in nine workshops titled “Illustrating Stories with the Thaumatrope,” which were held at various schools and led by Sérgio Pereira, a volunteer for this year’s festival.
The thaumatrope is a 19th-century optical toy and one of the precursors to cinema. It is a disc with an image on each side that, when spun, creates the illusion that the two images merge. The children learned how to build their own thaumatropes and used them to tell short stories about sustainable habits or to depict moments that left a lasting impression on them. As can be seen in some of the works we’ve shown here, one such moment was the visit by SIC, which was at CineEco to provide news coverage of the festival.
The festival also hosted the Eco-Videos Project Workshop, led by Sérgio Pereira and Laura Marques, in Loriga and at the Serra da Estrela Interpretation Center. During a tour of the town of Loriga, a small group of participants learned how to film the area using their cell phones and produced several videos about the landscape, the community, and the environment.
The workshops are part of the festival’s educational component, which aims to bring cinema and environmental issues closer to the school community and the local area.
