22ND LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL– 22 FICLPGC (April 14 to 23)
On Monday, April 17, the screening of the ten feature films will begin, two of them forming a diptych, and two days later, on Wednesday, April 19, the short film competition will start as well
Oscar nominee Ildikó Enyedi, programmer and curator Gerwin Tamsma and the influential filmmaker, actress and producer Fatou Jupiter Touré make up the Official Feature Films Jury; while the short film awards will be decided by two festival directors, Doris Bauer, of Vienna Shorts, and Per Fikse, of Festival Minimalem, as well as Caimán Cuadernos de Cine’s film critic Cristina Aparicio
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Tuesday, March 28, 2023-. After an intense weekend dedicated to The Spirit of the Beehive and Terence Davies’ cycles, and to the screening of works featured in sections such as Canarias Cinema, Panorama Spain as well as other out-of-competition ones such as Camera Obscura, Panorama and Déjà Vu, the official competition of the 22nd Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival will begin.
According to what was announced at the press conference by the director of the film event, Luis Miranda, in regards to the Official Section’s full program, the first screening of the competing feature films will take place on Monday, April 17 at 9:30 a.m. at Cinesa El Muelle. From that moment on, the screens will show ten Spanish premieres, in the feature films’ case, and, from Wednesday 19 on, three short-film sessions (April 19, 20 and 21) in which the thirteen selected works will be distributed.
The Councilwoman for Culture of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria’s City Council, organizer and promoter of the Festival, noted that the presentation of the contents “publicly shows the result of our Festival team’s intense work.” Which, at least in regards to the contents of each section, is available on the digital portal lpafilmfestival.com. On the other hand, the programming schedule will soon be available digitally.
At their meeting with the media, Miranda shared the approach they have followed in the preparation of Festival’s competitive sections: a viewing of over three hundred films in which “we do not intend to emphasize anything specific or seek pre-established themes,” he stressed. “What underpins the programming is the capacity for comparative analysis,” a matter that the Festival director attributed to the “excellent team of programmers with a deep and broad knowledge of cinema history.” He claimed that they all have “a keen eye, ear and taste for the dialectic between norm and exception, the most complicated thing.”
As he explained at the press conference, the competitive section abounds in humor based on irony: “not that frequent in other official festival sections,” he pointed out. Furthermore, he stressed in his speech other characteristics such as the predominance of fiction and the wide presence of Ibero-American cinema.
Regarding the Official Feature Films Section, Luis Miranda explained that it will be made up of ten films, with two of them participating together as a single work in the form of a diptych, “a mirror with two faces,” as programmer Miguel Angel Perez Quintero suggested in the catalog. This is the Portuguese film Viver mal / Mal viver by João Canijo, a melodrama that hands over the protagonist role of one piece to the supporting characters of the other, and vice versa.
This scheme of “majestic aesthetics”, according to Pérez Quintero, is an example of the path taken by an edition that, without imperatives, moves away from the conventionalisms and presuppositions associated with festival films. In fact, in the text that precedes the section in the catalog, they venture to assure that the selection is “an unbiased showcase asserting that festival films do not have to be sour and, much less, boring.”
There will be some singular works, such as The Bride by Rwandan female director Miriam U. Birara or the Singaporean, Taiwanese, French and Portuguese coproduction Tomorrow is a Long Time by Jow Zhi Wei, both about limitations or confinements of different nature. But there will also be room for comedy, tragicomedy and indie. An example of these are the films Voyages en Italie by Sophie Leteurneur, About Thirty by Martin Shanly and The Adults by Dustin Guy Defa, respectively.
Playfulness will appear inescapably associated with works such as the Danish thriller Copenhagen Does not Exist by Martin Skovbjeg, “in which you are never sure who is the cat and who is the mouse,” the musical story The Klezmer Project by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, a work in which “reality and fiction play tricks on each other,” notes Pérez Quintero; and the found-footage film Silent Witnesses, a posthumous work by Luis Ospina and co-directed by Jerónimo Atehortúa Arteaga that “dares to invent chapters in the history of his country history.”
The thirteen short films included in the Official Section, from diverse origins (Asian, European and American works coincide), share the restless spirit of the feature films’ selection. They “refuse to be restricted to a framework and include films with a driving curiosity about the limits of form and a preference for mood over plot,” writes programmer Andreea Patru in the catalog. These are, the text continues, filmmakers who “explore the fluid boundaries between genres and deepen our personal and social meditation. More than ever, it is a selection of empathy, of subtle identification with otherness”.
Jury
Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, author of the Golden Bear winner and Oscar-nominated On Body and Soul, as well as of My 20th Century, one of the 12 Best Hungarian Films of All Time and selected among the 10 Best Films of the Year by The New York Times; Gerwin Tamsma, film curator and programmer at Rotterdam for over 25 years, and Fatou Jupiter Touré, one of the most impactful Africans according to the Tropics magazine, actress, director, producer, United Nations ambassador, entrepreneur, founder of the Les Téranga Film Festival since 2019, and President of WIFT Senegal (Women in Film and Television), are the members of the jury in charge of granting the Official Feature Films Section’s awards.
On the other hand, Cristina Aparicio, film critic of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, among others; cultural manager and curator Doris Bauer, co-director of the international short film festival VIENNA SHORTS; and Per Fikse, director of the Minimalen Short Film Festival in Trondheim, Norway, will be in charge of the short film awards.
Selection
OFFICIAL SECTION – FEATURE FILMS
Adentro mío estoy bailando / The Klezmer Project by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann (Austria, Argentina, 2023, 117 min.)
Arturo a los 30 / About Thirty by Martín Shanly (Argentina, 2023, 92 min.)
Kobenhavn findes ikke / Copenhagen Does Not Exist by Martin Skovbjerg (Denmark, 2023, 98 min.)
Mal Viver / Bad Living by João Canijo (Portugal, France, 2023, 127 min.)
Viver mal / Living Bad by João Canijo (Portugal, France, 2023, 125 min.)
Míng tian bi zuo tian chang jiu / Tomorrow Is a Long Time by Jow Zhi Wei (Singapore, Taiwan, France, Portugal, 2023, 106 min.)
Mudos testigos / Silent Witnesses by Luis Ospina and Jerónimo Atehortúa Arteaga (Colombia, France, 2023, 78 min.)
The Adults by Dustin Guy Defa (USA, 2023, 91 min.)
The Bride by Myriam U. Birara (Rwanda, 2023, 73 min.)
Voyages en Italie by Sophie Letourneur (France, 2023, 91 min.)
OFFICIAL SECTION – SHORT FILMS
A Passing Cloud by Tang Peiyan (China, 2022, 14 min.)
AliEN0089 by Valeria Hofmann (Chile, 2023, 22 min.)
At Little Wheelie Three Days Ago by Andrew Stephen Lee (USA, 2022, 18 min.)
Azul / Blue Has No Dimensions by Ágata de Pinho (Portugal, 2022, 20 min.)
Buurman Abdi / Neighbour Abdi by Douwe Dijkstra (The Netherlands, 2022, 29 min.)
Fur by Zhen Li (USA, 2022, 7 min.)
Garotos Ingleses / British Boys by Marcus Curvelo (Brazil, 2022, 15 min.)
Maria Schneider, 1983 de Élisabeth Subrin (France, 2022, 25 min.)
Paradiso, XXXI, 108 by Kamal Aljafari (Palestine, Germany, 2022, 18 min.)
Prosinecki by Adrian Duncan (Ireland, 2023, 21 min.)
Ruovesi by Andrea Zapata-Girau (Spain, 2023, 18 min.)
Wo de peng you / All Tomorrow’s Parties by Zhang Dalei (China, 2023, 24 min.)
Zarzal by Sebastián Valencia Mūnoz (Colombia, 2022, 18 min.)
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