Drac Màgic

In a context where pedagogical renewal movements in Catalonia were working to dismantle Francoism in schools, Drac Màgic placed cinema and culture at the center, turning them into sensitive material for questioning monolithic subjects and proposing methodologies based on student interests and the interdisciplinarity of knowledge.

Drac Màgic’s goal is to generate thought and action around the image to contribute to building a society that is responsible, active, and creative toward visual culture and its role in shaping collective imaginaries.

The cooperative’s main projects are: Construir Mirades, an educational program for training in audiovisual languages; the Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones de Barcelona, a film festival directed by women; and Pack Màgic, a distributor of children’s cinema.

The cooperative Drac Màgic is a living organism that, since its beginnings, has contributed to the creation of cooperative ecosystems in the city of Barcelona and Catalonia. Some key aspects that shaped Drac Màgic's internal governance include the pursuit of a sustainable balance between personal and work life, the promotion of a work culture that values both productive and reproductive tasks, the implementation of participatory decision-making mechanisms, the formation of autonomous teams, and the creation of a dynamic work environment centered on personal and professional growth, debate, mutual learning, and open knowledge.

During Drac Màgic's first decades, methodological approaches were developed that, in essence, remain part of its pedagogy today. To bring film education into schools, two methods were designed to position cinema as an interdisciplinary subject and a focal point of interest. That is, the proposal sought to move beyond the utilitarian paradigm of cinema as mere illustration—where films served only as supporting material—and instead highlight the intrinsic value of the cinematic medium itself: its languages, the possibilities of audiovisual storytelling, the diversity of aesthetic approaches, visual and iconographic universes, and its interdisciplinary potential.

By the late 1970s, Drac Màgic also established itself as a cultural initiative aimed at normalizing the distribution of children’s films dubbed into Catalan with the creation of Distribuidora Imatge, a distributor of children’s cinema. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the cooperative incorporated the Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones de Barcelona (MIFDB), born from the aforementioned debates and collaborations with feminist movement spaces and discussions in the city. At its inception, the MIFDB's goals were to rediscover pioneering women in cinema, highlight notable filmmakers and cinematographies from diverse regions, and provide a panoramic view of recent feminist filmmaking.