- Third and last screening of the short films competing in the official section of the festival
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Thursday, April 6, 2017. The 17th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival’s oficial section presents on Thursday 5 two new titles competing for the Cajamar Foundation Golden Lady Harimaguada: the French production Still Life (Maud Alpi, France, 2016, 82 min.), a disturbing story in between documentary and fiction set in a slaughterhouse, which already won the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Award for First Feature at the Locarno festival, and the Filipino The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz, Philippines, 2016, 227 min.), the vengeance story of a woman after her jail release because of which this singular filmmaker won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the last Venice Festival.
The press screening of Still Life will be at noon at the Monopol’s screen 2. Its director won, apart from the aforementioned award at Locarno, the Delluc Award in the First Film category. The film will be screened again in the evening, at 20:30 p.m., at the same screen.
Director Maud Alpi addresses in this film a story where feelings and emotions place men and animals on the same vital level. Every night, a dog whose owner works in a slaughterhouse witnesses the suffering of the animals brought there. Lambs and calves seem to know what awaits them and they squirm, uneasy, before being led to their ends in a macabre procession on the verge of dawn.
Still life is written by its director herself and by Baptiste Boulba-Ghigna, and starred by amateur Virgile Hanrot and Dimitri Buchenet.
In an afternoon showing, at 6 p.m., will be the first screening of The Woman Who Left, last work of the singular and radical filmmaker Lav Diaz, who comes back to the festival with this story born from a tale by Leon Tolstoy in which he approaches the vengeance of a woman after her jail release because of an offense she did not commit. The Philippines are again the setting of Diaz’s film, a dark and complex place that takes in the recent liberated Horacia Somorostro, played by actress and producer Charo Santos-Concio, at the heart of its personal and family dramas. The film, like the previous titles of the author, is extraordinarily long, four hours, which the director presents as well in a rather unusual format, the black and white.
A regular figure at festivals, Lav Diaz was awarded for this film, included in the official section of the 17th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, the Golden Lion at the last Venice Festival for this film, in an edition whose jury was headed by director Sam Mendes, and which has been shown at the Toronto, Mar del Plata, Rotterdam and Vienna competitions so far. The Woman Who Left is distributed in Spain by Abordar.
Lav Diaz at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival
In 2008, the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Film Festival received Lav Diaz’s visit due to the “Puntos calientes” section, which showed, among other emergent cinematographies, the Filipino one, and reunited him with his countrymen Raya Martin, Brillante Mendoza and Khavan de la Cruz, as well as with Malayan Woo Ming Jin. At that time, Death in the Land of Enchantos (Philippines, 2007, 544 min.) was screened. Likewise, in 2014, Lav Díaz’s cinematography was present at the Panorama section of the Festival, which included the title Norte, The End of History (Philippines, 2013, 250 min.)
The Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival’s official selection is supported by Spain’s Public Agency for Cultural Action, through the Program for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture, which reflects in its titles the thorough global search carried out by the festival.
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