Spain: Local Film Scene
Teaserland is a very unique film festival. It is solely comprised of film trailers for films that do not exist. This is exactly the point of this brand new festival created under the guidance of the Sitges Film Fest folk. The winner walks away is with 30.000€ and so his/her trailer has the opportunity to take the shape of an actual short film. The competition, which started more as a funny, crazy idea than anything else has up to this point received more than one thousand fake trailers.
Among the jury we find the influential figures of the Spanish cinema in: director Jaume Balagueró (Rec) and film critics Jaume Figueres and Mirito Torreiro. There are only 4 trailers remaining in the competition and every week one of them is eliminated via a popularity vote on the fest’s website. You can go ahead and vote for your favorite at www.teaserland.com.
The Málaga Film Festival (which we had highlighted last month) awarded the Golden Biznaga (30.000€) prize to David Planell’s La Vergüenza, the story of a couple who become overwhelmed when they adopt a child. The second most important award went to El niño pez by Lucía Puenzo (Silver Biznaga). The great surprise of this edition was Tres días con la familia (Three days with the family), which achieved the prizes of Best Director (Mar Coll), Best Actress (Nausicaa Bonnín) and Best Actor (Eduard Fernández). The movie reproduces the three days Lea has to spend in Girona (city located in the north-east of Spain) with her family in order to assist to her grandfather’s funeral. The death of the patriarch of the Vich i Carbó family is the perfect catalyst to force his descendents to get along and it makes the controversies of the bourgeois family go visible.
Documentary films stole the spotlight on the first week of May, as Documenta Madrid celebrated its 6th edition. This year, 107 works were screened and the jury awarded the top prize to Carlos Hagerman and Juan Carlos Rulfo’s Mexican title Los Que se Quedan (“Those Who Stay Behind”). The Spanish documentary La ciudad de los Signos (The City of Signs), by Samuel Alarcón, received the Audience Award.
Finally, Asian cinema found also its spot this month in Barcelona with the BAFF festival. On May 11, Yang Ik-june’s first work, Breathless, obtained the Golden Durian, a 6.000€ award. This South-Korean artist is quite an “multi-tasker”, since he did not only directed the movie, but also wrote its script and played its main role — let alone other production duties. The jury decided to recognize Ik-june’s talent to approach the difficult issue of domestic violence with honesty.
Spain: International Film Scene
Luis Buñuel was the last Spanish director who was awarded with the Palme d’or for Viridiana. That was in 1961. The drought continues. This year we saw Spain with three representatives and domestically for us they are three heavyweights: Pedro Almodóvar, Isabel Coixet and Alejandro Amenábar. The first two had main comp slots while the later film was an out of comp selection. Firstshowing.net had an interview with Amenábar.
Almodóvar competed with Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces), which didn’t have enough clout to seduce the jury and the critical reaction was rather mixed. Isabel Coixet’s Cannes debut and her 9th movie, Map of the Sounds of Tokyo didn’t make much of an impression either. This “romantic thriller”, obviously located in the Japanese capital, is played by the terrific Spanish actor Sergi López and the award nominee Japanese Rinko Kikuchi, Between them a very passionate relationship develops, always surrounded by a tragic atmosphere and the accurate, extremely personal musical selection, a characteristic in Coixet’s films.
Spain was also repped in the other sections as well. The Critic’s Week saw Gabe Ibáñez‘s Hierro (see picture of Elena Anaya above) take the Godfather’s movie spotlight, while The Director’s Fortnight section saw international co-production Tetro open the section and Chema Garcia Ibarra‘s short film The attack of the robots from Nebula-5 also play in the section.