• The councilman of Culture, Josué Íñiguez, and the director of the Festival, Luis Miranda, introduced an edition that pays tribute to David Lynch
• This year’s program, comprising over a hundred titles, is divided into the competitive sections as well as the usual ones, which shall offer screenings that connect cinema’s past and present through the way they approach reality
• Cine Yelmo Las Arenas will hold screenings and some of the talks, the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium will host meetings and press conferences, and the Hotel Cristina by Tigotan shall repeat as a work and hospitality space
•The ‘Film Conferences’ will bring on Saturday 26 actors Javier Gutiérrez, Bàrbara Lennie, Nathalie Poza and Carolina Yuste to a round table moderated by journalist Carlos del Amor
04.14.2025. Alfredo Kraus Auditorium. LPGC International Film Festival’s Presentation. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Pictures: Eros Santana.
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Monday, April 14, 2025.- The Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival will open its 24th edition next Friday, April 25. As advanced in the press conference held this morning, it will be a unique and diverse festival, considering it’ll combine daring works with others more accessible, “a world of contrasts,” according to the programming team, but equally rich and relevant.
So it was explained by the councilman of Culture Josué Íñiguez and the director of the Festival Luis Miranda. Both agreed that dedicating 2025 to David Lynch shall mark a year which maintains the usual programming coherence but yields to a filmmaker who managed to reach and thrill the great public while taking formal and artistic risks.
According to the councilman, both trends must coexist for the city to get close to this annual event, regardless of age or film knowledge. For him, the Festival’s quality has been proven to the point that satisfies the most demanding audiences. “It is the work of many years,” he said about its programmers, ‘and,’ he continued, “thanks to it we have been able to watch a lot of films in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria that have later had an international impact. And this is a direct result of the team’s instinct.” Due to their search for titles, the city receives “the novelties of those narrative urges that show how societies are experiencing all these relevant processes of change that we’ve been living in recent years.”
Going back to the retrospective dedicated to David Lynch, Miranda announced that the Festival shall have a space devoted to his particular universe which will host screenings and meetings with intellectuals and filmmakers who are close to his legacy: film critic and writer Quim Casas, writer and director of the New York Festival Dennis Lim, filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo, and film critic Violeta Kovacsics, all of them students of the Montana native’s work.
During the press conference, they also explained that the opening ceremony, which will be hosted by El Gran Wyoming, shall recreate Lynch’s sound atmosphere by turning to the filmmaker’s main composer: Angelo Badalementi. Thanks to the collaboration of the Tenerife Film Music Festival (Fimucité), the opening ceremony, besides introducing the Festival’s contents and sections, shall offer a unique concert as a tribute to the American musician who worked with the filmmaker on numerous occasions: Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks (1990 tv series), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Lost Highway (1996), The Straight Story (1999) or Mulholland Drive (2001).
The musical selection performed by the Canarias Big Band, led by Kike Perdomo, is a jazz tribute the Tenerife Film Music Festival already held for its audience in 2023 under the name of ‘Jazzdalamenti’.
This shared homage to the legacies of both authors, musician and filmmaker alike, will be accompanied by a visual piece created by Canarian award-winning director Macu Machín. As a result, the organizers of the Gran-Canarian Film Festival have opted for the opening ceremony to be held at the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium’s Jerónimo Saavedra Room, which offers a space of proximity, intimacy and a moving and sensorial experience.
Likewise, considering screenings would have started that morning and will continue ceaselessly until Sunday, May 4, this edition has chosen a concert, rather than a film, to open the year dedicated to David Lynch, though, of course, with the aforementioned audiovisual piece by Macu Machín.
2025 will therefore be a special year for discovering or recovering on the big screen all of Lynch’s features and numerous short films, as well as four episodes from the tv series Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series—released 25 years later—, both of which are available at SkyShowtime.
But this will be the year, too, in which remembering two great film stars: Gena Rowlands and Gene Hackman. One of the last divas of the golden age of cinema and the unforgettable actor will appear in the Gran-Canarian Festival as part of the special section Gene & Gena, a farewell that’ll bring back such well-known works as A Women Under the Influence by John Cassavetes (USA, 1974, 155 min.) and Gloria by John Cassavetes (USA, 1980, 121 min.), in Rowlands’ case; and The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola (USA, 1974, 113 min.) and The French Connection by William Friedkin (USA, 1971, 104 min.), with Hackman.
Such a unique tribute couldn’t omit Another Woman, by Woody Allen (USA, 1988, 81 min.), a film featuring both actors.
Film legacies are what Déjà vu, the section dedicated to cinema’s universal heritage, is all about, although the Festival has also programmed a tribute to the late Donald Sutherland outside this annual spot reserved to approaching great films from a new perspective: a special screening of Robert Altman’s significant satire MASH.
Furthermore, Spanish contemporary film talent will stand out, too. It will do so, once again, at the event produced by 18 Chulos, which has been known for the past four years as ‘Film Conferences’. The round table, scheduled for the first Saturday morning of the Festival and featuring actors Javier Gutiérrez, Bàrbara Lennie, Nathalie Poza and Carolina Yuste, will be moderated by RTVE’s journalist Carlos del Amor.
And after that first weekend that’ll be marked by the works competing in Canarias Cinema, the Official Section will begin on Monday, April 27: ten feature films backed by prestigious awards obtained at international festivals such as Rotterdam, Locarno, Venice, Berlin or Sundance. Documentaries, comedies and even some thrillers shall offer, according to the programming team, one of the most open and diverse section in recent years. For programmer Jaime Pena, the key word is “contrast”, “a perfect guide for us to explore the ten feature films competing for the Golden Lady Harimaguada this year.” The Official Section, then, has taken off its corsets to expand its scope of action, though all in accordance with the usual programming line.
The fifteen short films, divided into three screenings, shall give us a glimpse of the great moment the format is currently experiencing. According to its programmer, Andreea Patru, many of them “are committed to looking—or sometimes seeing. Whether they create fictional narratives or challenge genre and form as an innate characteristic of the short film, the directors seek to captivate us in a media-saturated world.”
Patru understands the viewing experience as challenging and gratifying. She concludes by stating that this is “a program to explore the transformative possibilities of short cinema at its fullest.”
Panorama Spain will also present itself in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria as an open window to independent, different and excellent pieces thanks to “the wealth of our young and restless filmmakers and their relentless pursuit of new cinematic frontiers,” as programmer Elodie Mellado claims in the Festival’s catalog.
They are works seeking their paths through festivals. Six feature films and three short films shall showcase “Spanish cinema’s uniqueness” to the audience, as well as the excellent health of productions that have sometimes managed to erase the limits between festivals and movie theaters.
On the other hand, the last competitive section, Bande à Part, will include pieces by three filmmakers who have grown under the shelter of the Festival’s Canarias Cinema. Samuel Delgado and Helena Girón, as co-directors, and Cayetana H. Cuyás have not only leapt to other international festivals, but continue to create new trends in the Gran-Canarian event while competing in museums and art galleries with other filmmakers renowned in the international artistic circuit. A Hundred-Headed Dragon, the short film by the former pair, and The Prado and the Moon, the feature by the latter, are part of the most experimental selection and will be shown together in a single screening. This year, this intimate and poetic section will also feature two works that could be part of “queer cinema’s imaginary,” according to the programmer of Bande à Part, Antonio Weinrichter: Sirens Call and Towards the Sun, Far From the Center.
Camera Obscura, silent cinema with live music, recovers for the silver screen two centenary works. First, on April 30, the audience will have the opportunity to attend a single screening of The Phantom of the Opera, by Rupert Julian (USA, 1925, 89 min.), that’ll be accompanied by Gustav Hinrich’s compositions performed by Sergio Alonso. In addition, this cycle will include one of the films that were announced during the poster’s introduction: Battleship Potemkin, by Sergei Eisenstein (Soviet Union, 1925, 68 min.). Its 100th anniversary will be celebrated on May 1 with its screening accompanied by live music: the International Bach Festival (Bach IBF Canarias) will adapt Dmitri Shostakovich’s compositions under the direction of Humberto Armas and performed by the Ornati Quartet and Noemí Salomón.
These sections, as well as the aforementioned ‘Déjà vu’, ‘Magic Lantern’, ‘The Freakiest Night’ and the must-see ‘Panorama’ and the masterpieces it recovers, whose details will be advanced in the following days, comprise over a hundred titles and shall take up seven screening rooms at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas, one of the seats of the Festival. Additionally, the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium will host the opening ceremony as well as the Film Conferences and the press conferences, while the Hotel Cristina by Tigotan shall repeat as a work and hospitality space for meetings related to the film industry.
COMPETITIVE SECTIONS:
OFFICIAL FEATURE FILMS SECTION
NON-COMPETITIVE SECTIONS announced so far
SPECIAL SCREENINGS: GENE & GENA
SPECIAL SCREENING: DONALD SUTHERLAND TRIBUTE
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