• David Pantaleón offers a hopeless researcher’s microfable in El naciente; Jesús F. Cruz airs the psychedelic anger of the goats in his Cabreo; and Fernando Alcántara shows in Colonos del espacio how humans are capable of adapting and dominating the environment
• The idea of an impossible escape to San Borondón defines La isla errante, by Pablo Borges; and Alexander Cabeza Trigg explores La Gomera’s distant past by connecting it with a contemporary way of looking
• The festival has scheduled this first installment of Canarian pieces for this Saturday, April 20, at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas (Screen 6, 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.)
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Friday, April 19, 2024. Magic and memory move, as an underlying connecting link, between the different pieces programmed in Canarias Cinema’s first short film session of this 23rd edition of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival. David Pantaleón, Jesús F. Cruz, Fernando Alcántara, Pablo Borges and Alexander Cabeza Trigg are the filmmakers included in this selection of Canarian short films, which will be screened this Saturday, April 20, at Cine Yelmo Las Arenas (Screen 6, 10:00 a.m. and 5 p.m.): a collection of different ways of understanding documentary fiction through most of their combined footage.
El naciente (David Pantaleón) | 4 min.
El naciente (Emerging), by David Pantaleón, offers the first supernatural piece of this session, in a work that the Gran-Canarian director (a good connoisseur of the Film Festival), shot during La Palma’s last Festivalito. He explains that he filmed it “as things are shot there, with a theme or slogan that they throw at you, and in this case it was ‘I don’t want to grow up, I’m not an avocado’. With that premise we put together a little story about the fountain of eternal youth.”
There, in La Palma, this four-minute short film won the audience award, “which is always a very nice thing, because the audience there is also the people who’ve been making the short films. I was glad they showed that kind of love to it,” said Pantaleón. According to the director, “the most interesting thing for me is the film that would emerge from the ending of the short, which is something that could produce very strange things. And we don’t know whether for good or for bad.”
The author of El naciente highlights Javier Cerdá’s role as director of photography, “because it was the first time we collaborated, and the truth is that I was very comfortable working with him.” For Pantaleón, these are the details of a production that captivate him because “beyond how the films turn out in the end, their making processes always give you something magical. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.”
Cabreo (Jesús F. Cruz) | 13 min.
Jesús F. Cruz made his debut at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival two years ago with Una flor en el vacío (A Flower in the Void). Since then, and with a couple of other pieces in his résumé, Cruz continues to grow as a filmmaker, something that is reflected in his peculiar Cabreo (Goat Anger). The director exhibits in this new short film his personal and very recognizable visual style, in which textures, film grain, psychedelic inspiration and an exploitational tone endow his work with a seductive irony.
“That’s because I don’t really like the result of the camera,” Cruz points out, “because I actually shoot with an SLR camera and just go with it. And of course, I love to evoke all the 70s’ science fiction and psychedelia. Or the retro trends that have gone along those lines. Yes, my comfort zone is in the fantastic genre, until I decide to finally get into other things. All my ideas go through it: I have a kind of filter of the fantastic.”
That filter has been applied by the Canarian director to all the elements used to design a piece in which, he claims, “the goat itself shows its anger at humans, or at the people who have treated it badly throughout history.” A sort of telluric memory of the Canary Islands is presented in Cabreo through Cruz’s peculiar vision, with music by Peste Bubónica, an artist to whom the director offered a convenient deal for both parties: Cruz would make his first video clip and, in exchange, he would include her music in his short film, “because I heard it when I was editing it, and the truth is that it was perfect for it.”
Jesús F. Cruz is still, at this point, “a little surprised” by his Festival selection. He is aware that “what I do is something very strange, I mix very strange things and yet they have given me the opportunity… I’m freaking out, to tell you the truth.” A feeling that has not left him since his 2022 debut at the event, and to which he points out that “in Canarias Cinema and in general, the Festival gives an opportunity to other types of cinema. Thanks to this, I have been able to see works on the big screen that otherwise would have escaped me.”
Cruz also appreciates being able to talk with other filmmakers and immersing himself in the film circles at this particular time, in his homeland, now that “in the Canary Islands I’m seeing that people take things from other places and put them in their films. That enriches everything, and also makes us support each other.”
Colonos del espacio (Fernando Alcántara) | 11 min.
When the screen announces to the audience that they are about to see pictures of the XXVI National High Mountain Camp of 1967, it is clear that they are in front of a creative editing piece: Colonos del espacio (Space Settlers). A meaningful and careful work by Fernando Alcántara in which the volcanic caldera seems, rather than a background, the real main character.
Because space is the environment to which humans must adapt and which they have to dominate. That’s why Alcántara also mentions a sentence by Manuel Alemán in his work: “There is an anthropology of space because space is a dimension of man” (Psicología del hombre canario, 1980). “I’m developing a feature-length fiction film when, during the research, I come across this film at the Filmoteca,” explains the director. At first, this material “was not part of any plan to put together a short film, but over time, and as I was relating to the pictures, I realized that its narrative possibilities were linked to the themes I was just working on, but that they also had a meaning of their own.”
From there, Alcántara began “a creative editing process: with the technique and sound design work, I tried to bring these ideas down from the film to the short film.” He succeeded, though surprised by the fact that the pictures “are exquisitely filmed, very well photographed, in terms of framing, lighting, camera movements… The shots lasted as long as they lasted, but I adapted to them.”
“I work with psychogeographic ideas, on how spaces affect us psychologically, on how we occupy the territory. There is a metaphor here about the way we come to a space, are able to adapt to it and somehow dominate it. That, in addition, offers multiple readings about the current state of the Canary Islands, and so on,” the author explains. Which is no small background for an editing exercise.
Even more so when the original material is shot in 16 mm in black and white with a “very evocative” texture, he specifies. “There is something in those pictures”, he continues, “they have a density, they last over time. Analog texture has a lot of weight, and that was another reason why I wanted to make something with this material.”
The filmmaker, who has also been in charge of the editing of Las cosas queridas (a short film by Pablo Vilas participating as well in this edition of Canarias Cinema), feels the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Film Festival is “a meeting point, a place you long to get to throughout the year: you meet colleagues, discover films, share your work… I think all the participants of Canarias Cinema agree that it has been very didactic when it comes to educating our visions. And how its own programming has influenced us when it comes to continuing the process ourselves as filmmakers. You are looking forward to it, to discover what is happening in Spain and internationally with new narrative forms. I think it fills a gap which has been orphaned in terms of a type of cinema that is not shown in commercial theaters. And, as a cinephile, it gives you the possibility of going to see these films that are on the margins.”
La isla errante (Pablo Borges) | 18 min.
Pablo Borges tells in La isla errante (The Wandering Island) a story imbued in a particular “Canarian magical realism,” as he points out. “From the conception of the piece, I was sure: on the one hand, with San Borondón’s evocative fantasy, which we islanders have often in mind, and on the other hand, one of the Canary Islands’ harshest realities, which is tourist over-exploitation. I wanted the short film to pivot between those two points,” says the director himself. His creative effort is also “very plastic, with an iconography that illustrates where I wanted to take San Borondón’s creature.”
That, and no other, is La isla errante: its absence “reminds us that there is no other spare island to go to if we do things badly in our own,” Borges stresses. In his fiction, veteran José Luis de Madariaga (the owner of a banana plantation) and Thomas Schumann (the businessman who tempts him with a purchase offer) play the main roles. However, “we didn’t have to portray any demon either, like the German beast that comes for our land, it wasn’t that. Although there is no denying that part of the foreign capital is there,” says the filmmaker.
Iván Álamo and a young Sergio Hernández complete the cast as the son and grandson of the main character. During the project stage of the short film, Borges was told “not to work with dogs or children, very Hitchcockian. But well, Truffaut said just the opposite, that at least once in a lifetime you have to film with a child. I didn’t find it hard at all; the child, in the end, is playing a child. There are a lot of stolen shots, and genuine child’s behavior is captured. We were just telling him that he had to get out of A, go through B and get to C. It was all very natural.” “On the other hand,” he adds, “something very cool about the short film is his interaction with Madariaga, how the voice of experience clashes with that of someone who is just starting out, who sees all this as a game.”
For Borges, it has been “a pleasure to enjoy the festival as a spectator, to see the bulls from the sidelines and then to participate in it, fighting the bulls.” Something he managed to do in 2023 with Chlorine, when he made his debut in Canarias Cinema and in the festival, which “was something super nice in order to start building a career around festivals.” “To premiere here is to be in a superb film environment,” he claims. “The Festival has played a fundamental role in training filmmakers, before the arrival of film schools in the Canary Islands, and after that, too. And it has one of the best programs at the national level.”
To participate in it, Borges has accepted the difficulties and the “economic and emotional” ups and downs that many filmmakers have to face in their beginnings. Between one piece and another “you have to support yourself. I worked as an usher in a movie theater in Las Palmas to be able to make this short film.” The Canarian director demands more tools for island creators, “because I personally believe in the transformative power of cinema, especially in a society like ours.” For the time being, he has not left San Borondón completely, because “I do want to develop this story further. It could fit perfectly into a feature film. For now, we are still in the writing stage.”
El canto de los años nuevos (Alexander Cabeza Trigg) | 23 min.
Alexander Cabeza Trigg debuts at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival with El canto de los años nuevos (The Song of the Years to Come). A short film shot in La Gomera, self-produced and with the support of Aider La Gomera: an organization that takes different actions in the rural world, closely related to heritage. A common project between both parties crystallized in obtaining a grant from the European Union to promote new ways of thinking about intangible heritage. This, in turn, led to a series of workshops with children at a school in Vallehermoso, with the collaboration of local people “who worked as actors, with a very specific knowledge of the territory. We put the older people in conversation with the children. We did a workshop on listening to the landscape, another on archeology. And the sound of the short film is made by the children who put music to the piece.” The director confesses, too, that “in the end, everything got out of hand.”
The director points out how, “in El canto de los años nuevos, we link the tangible, the landscape, with the intangible.” And with the silbo gomero. The creative effort that the short film has demanded, in fact, fits Alexander Cabeza Trigg’s profile, an anthropologist and filmmaker who had previously made La tramuntana (2020). “I studied social and cultural anthropology in Barcelona, and I started doing some visual things, with photography, but ended up drifting towards moving pictures in an organic way. My working process is very much based on the methods and ideas that come from anthropology. I try to apply all that background to what I do with pictures,” says the filmmaker.
“What interests me the most,” he continues, “is to develop a filmmaking process that is not limited to imposing the director’s voice on the working space, but something that has to do with an exchange between myself, who I see as a kind of mediator, and the people who work on the piece. That’s what I take from anthropology to apply to cinema. In the end, the short film becomes a space in which to include different visions.”
Cabeza Trigg admits that “when you do things this way, assuming everything can be changed and everything can be improvised, it is sometimes difficult to set the limits. On the one hand, the piece exhibits a lot of freedom, but it becomes fragile at a narrative level.” To this day, as a filmmaker, he has taken up the challenge, even to the point of considering undertaking a new feature film project, which he has already begun to write.
Although the director is making his debut in the capital of Gran Canaria, he is well acquainted with the Festival, because “as I myself distribute what I do, I knew there was a connection between my films and what is done at the Festival. Many things are self-explanatory in this context,” and even more so when dealing with themes such as the one he approaches in his short film, because, he says, “there is a historical vision of the territory here that isn’t well understood on the Peninsula.”
The festival’s entire program is available on its official website, lpafilmfestival.com.
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