His biography would be incomplete without mentioning the political persecution he suffered. In 1957/1958 he was President-General of the Juventude Universitária Católica (Catholic University Youth) and film society leader at the Centro Cultural de Cinema (Cinema Cultural Centre, or CCC) between 1957 and 1960. Between 1960 and 1963 he received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The film societies were very important to his training as a cinephile. João Bénard da Costa stated that it was in these societies that he started to learn about the cinema: "I learned a lot and a generation - mine - owes its love of cinema to these historic film society screenings, which beginning in the late 1950s were relentlessly persecuted by a regime that was increasingly leery of them." (Os filmes da minha vida/Os meus filmes da vida, 'The Films of My Life/Films of a Lifetime', 1990, p. 7).

His first work as a programmer was at the Lisbon Cine-Club Universitário, in 1956-57, when he published, always as a defender of Catholic ideas, his first text on a film, specifically on Miracolo a Milano, by Vittorio De Sica. About this text, João Bénard da Costa states that his writing was "as Christian as it was Marxist, in a time of coded language." (Ibid.)

The film societies were publicly accused by the Salazar regime of being connected to the Communist Party, and therefore were persecuted by the political police. His programming exhibited films from Italian neo-realism, French poetic realism, some American films, Mexican realism and British films – as long as they were able to get past the censors. However, according to his testimony, within the film societies "not everything was orthodoxy. On the contrary, there was even a lot of heterodoxy manufactured there "(ibid.) – also due to the alliance between the Catholic left and the communists, of which João Bénard da Costa was a member. Saying that someone was a "leftist" could be cause for arrest in Portugal at that time, so they said that they were "progressive Catholics". João Bénard da Costa identified with this name, changing the Cine-Clube Universitário de Lisboa to the Centro Cultural de Cinema (Cinema Cultural Centre, or CCC), also known as the Cineclube de Universitários para uma Cultura Cristã (University Film Club for a Christian Culture).

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