The most experimental competition of the LPGCIFF begins with Sean Eternxs, Skazka and Bloom

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➢ The Festival’s most radical section will show four feature films and six short films, some of which, a feature and three shorts, will be Spanish premieres

➢ The catalog and full schedule are available on the official website lpafilmfestival.com

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Tuesday, April 18, 2023.- The competition in the most experimental section offered by the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, Bande à Part, begins this Wednesday, April 19, with the screening of the feature films Sean Eternxs (Argentina, 2022, 96 min.), by Argentine filmmaker Raúl Perrone, and Skazka (Russia, Belgium, 2022, 78 min.), by Aleksander Sokurov, as well as the short film Bloom (Spain, 2023, 18 min.), by Canarian filmmakers Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado, who will be at the cinema to introduce their work and talk about it with the audience.

The films of the future arrive at the twenty-second edition of the LPGCIFF with four features and six shorts that navigate within unexplored territories, a philosophy this competitive section embodies and sponsors.

Sean Eternxs (Argentina, 2022, 96 min.) by Raúl Perrone, will be the first title competing for the 5,000-euro award that will be screened, at 5:30 p.m. at Cinesa El Muelle Screen 6. According to the Argentine filmmaker, “I decided a long time ago not to make synopsis of my films anymore. I want people to arrive without knowing what they are going to see. Thanks for understanding.” 

The double session made up of Bloom and Skazka (Fairytale) will take place at 8:15 p.m. at the same screen. According to Bloom’s synopsis, everyone who has spent time in the Canary Islands has heard of the legend of the elusive island of San Borondón. For centuries, poets, adventurers, geographers, and lunatics searched in vain for it until it finally came into being through the lens of a film camera.

It will be followed by Skazka, a film that, using the deep fake technique, shows, in front of the gates of heaven, the ghosts of historical figures such as Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Mussolini, or Jesus Christ come to life. In an unreal limbo, they share anecdotes and remember their life experiences

The other titles included in this 3rd edition of Bande à Part are À vendredi, Robinson (France, 2022, 96 min.) by Mitra Farahani. Sixty years ago, one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema, the Swiss Jean-Luc Godard, and the Iranian poet and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, whose feature Brick and Mirror was included in this year’s Déjà Vu section, planned a meeting that never came to fruition. After so much time, Mitra Farahani managed to make that encounter finally take place and turn it into an epistolary exchange of e-mails.

The fourth feature film to premiere in Spain as part of the Festival, Home Invasion (UK, 2023, 91 min.), by filmmaker Graeme Arnfield, is a essay film on the history of the doorbell. Through found footage and mixed storytelling methods, it traces its presence in the labour struggles of the 19th century, the origins of cinema, and the contemporary surveillance culture.

The remaining short films to be screened are: Statistical Hallucination (Spain, 2023, 12 min.) by Anna Giralt and Jorge Caballero, an experimental tribute to La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), which transforms the text of that film into new images through an AI model. The Artist In The Machine (Austria, 2022, 3 min.), by Claudia Larcher, an experimental animation film generated from the series of collages Baumeister (2011-2021) realised by Claudia Larcher, digitally analyzed by an Al. It proposes a reflection on the role of machines in the creative process. Atlantic Yellow (Spain, 2022, 14 min.) by Carla Andrade, is a combination of still and moving images of the unique variety of granite that names the film, located in Serra da Groba (Galicia) and connected to ancestral forces. Flyby Kathy (Portugal, 2023, 11 min.) by Pedro Bastos, is an adaptation of The Rialto Report podcast about Kathy Harcourt, an English actress who mysteriously disappeared from the United States in 1981. Through a 35mm copy of the last film she starred in, this brief episode of the golden age of adult cinema is revisited. Idade Óssea (Portugal, 2022, 20 min.) by Isabel Aboim, reveals how, on a hot summer afternoon, two children play without noticing how time moves relentlessly. Based on five narrations, shot images, and superimposed animations, an exploration of the growing pains reveals these marks of time.

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