FIMFA Lx14

FIMFA Lx14 – International Festival of Puppetry and Animated Forms
7 to 25 May 2014
Lisbon - Portugal

Elephants, robots, shadows of abandoned objects, hyper-realistic puppets, a truly explosive cocktail on the major issues of humanity...
Experience the Puppetry universe as a mirror of different worldviews!

“We create robots for poetic reasons.” – Amit Drori

“The primary characteristic of puppeteers is a belief in the hidden life of things. A crushed piece of paper, a kitchen chair, a box or a book can appear to breathe in their hands. Another hallmark (…) is a visual creativity that they wish to express in scenic terms. They see a performance text through a prism of moving pictures; they see camels in clouds, dancers in daffodils, an old man in black bin liner, wolves in walls.” - Penny Francis

"While a human actor struggles to die on stage, puppets struggle to live and it is this struggle that audiences are able to empathize with." -- Adrian Kohler, Handspring Puppet Company

The International Festival of Puppetry and Animated Forms – FIMFA Lx is one of the most important festivals of puppetry and theatre in Portugal. Running since 2001, the festival is organized and produced annually by the puppet company A Tarumba - Teatro de Marionetas.

FIMFA Lx is an artistic project, open to new tendencies, of international dimension presenting an artistic and technical high-level programme, with a very contemporary point of view. The Festival won the 2010 Critics Award given by the Portuguese Association of Theatre Critics.

Since its first edition, confront and innovation are characteristics of this event, by presenting a programme that combines the newest technologies with the most traditional puppet companies, and projects with very elemental techniques, performed in an experimental and contemporary way.

The Festival aims to introduce different styles of puppetry and an artistic transversality by presenting a big diversity of techniques (shadows, objects, full-view manipulation, visual theatre, etc.), to the Portuguese audience, and to be a moment of shared experiences to artists and performers. In each edition, FIMFA intends to bring together the interest of artists, critics and theatre programmers, creating relations between directors and public, arts and languages, theatre and schools, universities and institutions.

Each year are invited a wide range of international companies, from all around the world, to perform in the best theatres of Lisbon, that are also our partners, like the Teatro São Luiz, Teatro Maria Matos, Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Centro Cultural de Belém, Museu da Marioneta, among other spaces.

On the fourteenth edition, running from 7th to 25th of May the highlights of FIMFA Lx14 will be WHS, Puppentheater Halle, TJP - Centre Dramatique National d'Alsace Strasbourg, Amit Drori, among others. Other activities are also included in the programme.

Welcome to FIMFA Lx14!