Panorama Spain draws the cartography of a good year

22nd LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL – 22 FICLPGC (April 14 to 23)

➢ Six feature films and three short films, distributed in six sessions, will compete for the Panorama Spain Award

➢ The selection includes two titles that are, as of yesterday, among the winners of the Malaga Film Festival: 20,000 Species of Bees and Aqueronte, Golden Biznaga for Best Spanish Film and Silver Biznaga for Best Documentary Short Film, respectively

➢ Writer and critic Elena Lazic, producer and filmmaker Magdalena Banasik and programmer and head of acquisitions and EYE programmer René Wolf will be in charge of granting this edition’s award

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Monday, March 20, 2023-. The Spanish cinema that is coming out strongly from the festival circuit will be present at Panorama Spain. Specifically, six feature films and three short films will compete for the award of that section, which was born in 2022 and is endowed with 5,000 euros for the director.

The programming team, through the words of Elodie Mellado in the text “Panorama Spain: Cartographies of a Good Year”, introduction to the section in the catalog, invites us to “be festive and adventurous” with a selection with which they say they “want to trascend genres and industry models, and stop over independent, experimental and also Martian galaxies.”

It should be noted that this cinema with which they also claim to want to “look further to comprehend our known, familiar and cozy dimensions” has been contemplated for more than fifteen years by the Gran Canarian event. Established as a permanent section in 2016, Panorama Spain has its roots in the proposal “D-Generation. Underground Experiences of Spanish non-fiction” that came to the Festival in 2007 and 2009 thanks to Josetxo Cerdán and Antonio Weinrichter’s initiative, both historians and professors specialized in production, the former, and in film criticism and programming, the latter.

Currently, this cinema, which already has its own space outside the commercial sphere, is experiencing a sweet moment. A good example of this, in addition to Lullaby, last year’s great success, are the awards that two of the films selected for this competitive section have just obtainted at the Malaga Spanish Film Festival: the Golden Biznaga for Best Spanish Film and the Silver Biznaga for Best Documentary Short Film have gone to 20,000 Species of Bees and Aqueronte, respectively. Both of them, along with seven other titles, will be shown in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in three independent screenings and three double sessions.

At the rate of one session per feature film, are programmed the following works: Golden Biznaga, Best Supporting Actress Award and Feroz Puerta Oscura Award at the recently closed 2023 Malaga Festival, 20,000 Species of Bees by Estíbaliz Urresola Solaguren (Spain, 2023, 125 min.); as well as To Books and Women I Sing by María Elorza (Spain, 2022, 72 min.) and La mala familia by Nacho A. Villar and Luis Rojo (Spain, 2022, 81 min.). And combining a short and a feature film: Alegrías riojanas by Velasco Broca (Spain, 2022, 28 min.) and Inmotep by Julián Génisson (Spain, 2022, 65 min.); La concha by Leire Apellaniz (Spain, 2022, 21 min. ) and Notes on a Summer by Diego Llorente (Spain, 2023, 84 min.); as well as Malaga’s Silver Biznaga for Best Documentary Short Film, Aqueronte by Manuel Muñoz Rivas (Spain, 2023, 26 min.), and H by Carlos Pardo Ros (Spain, 2022, 67 min.).

According to Elodie Mellado’s reflection in the catalog, the double programming of Alegrías riojanas and Inmotep is a reunion between two filmmakers united by a project such as “Ayudar al ojo humano”. According to the programmer, “their films are two opposites of the brand-new Spanish science fiction.” From the absurd, both Velasco Broca’s short film and Julián Génisson’s feature film, selected at Rotterdam and Seville, “put into orbit the strange universes” of the filmmakers, says Mellado.

Aqueronte and H are films that need to be seen on the big screen. The programmer places them in the branch of hypersensory cinema and writes that they use it as a “privileged threshold from which dreams and ghosts come back to life.” Andalusian Muñoz Rivas’ short film, winner of the KNF Award from the Dutch Film Writers’ Circle at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, situates on the Guadalquivir the permanent movement of a barge and the evolution of the disparate lives it supports. H, on the other hand, is based on the tragedy of the 1969 Sanfermines, specifically that of the goring in H’s heart.

The last double session is made up of two titles with a summer flavor: La concha by Leire Apellaniz and Notes on a Summer by Diego Llorente. Both the short film shot by producer Leire Apellaniz, “one of the most stimulating producers of our cinema,” according to the author of the catalog text, and Diego Llorente’s work, which “gives shade and flavor to summertime romances,” says Mellado, are films that “foretaste the summer heat from their respective constellations.”

Panorama Spain includes in its selection a documentary that arrives with the impulse of MECAS after having been shown at the Seville European Film Festival: La mala familia by Nacho A. Villar and Luis Rojo, the 2021 Almost-Finished Films MECAS Award. An emotional work that “openly looks at a group of friends struggling to rejoin society after committing a crime together,” points out Mellado.

To Books and Women I Sing, by María Elorza, is another one of the works to be screened at the Gran-Canarian Festival. As its title indicates, this film, which won the Youth Award at the San Sebastian Festival, “celebrates the joy of the big libraries, as well as the continuity of the legacy and its exponents,” says the text of the catalog.

Finally, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria will show for the first time in the Archipelago the grand prize of the Malaga Film Festival: 20,000 Species of Bees by Estíbaliz Urresola Solaguren (Spain, 2023, 125 min.), a film that before being selected and awarded at Malaga had been evaluated by the Programming team that points out that “it talks about being transgender while putting to the test the stiffness of the traditional family.”

The nine works proposed by the Programming Department invite us to “disengage our gaze and abandon the regular path.” They will be evaluated by a jury made up of writer and journalist Elena Lazic, independent film expert, producer and filmmaker Magdalena Banasik, and programmer and acquisitions expert René Wolf.

Panorama Spain Jury

French-born Elena Lazic, a Cineuropa collaborator, writes regularly for Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and The Playlist, among other media outlets. The founder and editor of the digital magazine Animus has contributed texts and essays to selected editions of DVD and Blu-ray labels such as Criterion, Second Sight, Indicator and Arrow.

The jury will bring the vision of an expert in production and project financing, Polish Magdalena Banasik. Trained at the Warsaw School of Economics and Film Production at the Polish National Film School, she has directed film events, projects and workshops and, after joining VoD platform Pantaflix as head of acquisitions, she took on the position of festival director at m-appeal world sales, a Berlin-based sales agency specializing in auteur and genre films. Banasik is currently responsible for sales and festivals.

Finally, the body in charge of granting the 5,000-euro Panorama Spain Award to the filmmaker of the winning work will be René Wolf, Head of Acquisitions and Senior Programmer at Filmmuseum Amsterdam, now EYE, the film and moving image museum in the Netherlands. Among his attributions is the annual series “Previously Unreleased” that selects films that deserve to be seen on the big screen but were overlooked for regular distribution in the territory. “Previously Unreleased” has shown, among others, the Spanish films La virgen de agosto by Jonás Trueba or Destello bravío by Ainhoa Rodríguez.