“Art seems to be the commitment to decipher or pursue the footprint left by a lost form of existence; the testimony that men have once enjoyed a different life.” The quote, obviously, is not ours, but it could serve, if we are allowed to be bold, as inspirational leitmotiv for the programme of this Panorama Spain. It has the traits of the brilliance of a woman as lucid and critical until the end of her existence at the beginning of the 1990s, as fundamental for an extended minority as unjustly unknown for a great majority of Spaniards, whose colossal intellectual work was acclaimed after decades of indifference, solitude, and exile.  She is María Zambrano, philosopher and essayist from Malaga.  Her ideological legacy is immense, in spite of being silenced and forgotten, as many others, especially female others, from the generation of ’27. An oblivion materialized also in her life, a life of hardships and extreme wants ving in a  small room in Ferney-Voltaire (France) with almost no incomes and in poor health just before receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and the Arts 1981, and long before becoming the first woman to receive the Cervantes Prize 1988.

The Spanish short film panorama brings us some of the most celebrated works released in the last twelve months. Seven short films, most of them directed by women who define inner universes, at times close to their own biographies and at times representing outside experiences. Works that go from economic crisis to moral crisis. Communitarian portrayals which hide portrayals of solitude. Works which elaborate a discourse looking to the future from traumas, traditions or violence of the past. A film which stamps firmly and has stood out in some of the most important international film festivals, from Berlin to Rotterdam, from Locarno to San Sebastian. But, above all, it brings the diversity and strength of the contemporary Spanish short film forward.

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