From 1990 to 1995 João Bénard da Costa was President of the Programming Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). He was in charge of the "Portuguese Cinema" chapter of the Einaudi encyclopaedia included in History of World Cinema, coordinated by Gian-Piero Brunetta, 2000. His essays on Portuguese cinema can also be found in collective works on twentieth century art, published by AR.CO (1999) and the National Cultural Centre (1998). In addition to these publications, he was invited in 2004 by the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales in Madrid to coordinate the volume dedicated to Portugal of the History of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Cinema, to be published in 2010.

In addition to these publications, he was a columnist at the newspapers Expresso and Público. Other studies, in addition to cinema and its history, reveal his extensive and varied cultural interests. This is the case of the following works: Emmanuel Mounier (Moraes, 1960), Os silêncios do Vaticano (‘The Silence of the Vatican’, Moraes, 1966), Da pedagogia não directiva como pedagogia personalista (‘Non-directive pedagogy as personalist pedagogy’, Gulbenkian, 1966), Nós os vencidos do Catolicismo (We, the vanquished of Catholicism’, Tenacitas, 2003). In this work from 2003, João Bénard da Costa brought together a series of chronicles that were published in August of 1997 in the weekly O Independente. These chronicles are based on the poem by Ruy Belo "Nós os vencidos do catolicismo", and constitute a personal testimony of a militant Catholic and which culminates in a state of rupture with the organic and hierarchical structure of the Church. This expression, which is the title of that poem, would earn a generational meaning thanks to João Bénard da Costa, its primary promoter. As noted above, his religious position is also related to his opposition to the authoritarian regime of the time: "We multiplied [in the early 1960s] in speeches and debates. The encyclicals of John XXIII, the Council, justified them and demanded them and there were no 'clarification sessions' in any church or parish hall, where we did not appear as shock troops to throw into relief the growing contradiction between the thoughts of the Pope and the work of the regime." (Nós os vencidos do Catolicismo, 2003, p. 68)

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