Interview: Miguel Llansó

Photo taken from the Lanzadera Films website

    This is the last of the interviews that I conducted at D'A Festival in Barcelona back at the end of April. It was by far the longest of the three interviews I did there, which is why it's taken a bit longer to materialise - as I've said previously, learning to translate and simultaneously transcribe audio has been a bit of a sharp learning curve (I'm going to investigate whether there is such a thing as a phonetic Spanish dictionary) and it definitely gives my brain a workout - but given that I didn't have the time to do it when I first returned home, it made sense to hang on to the interview until Crumbs was screening somewhere in the UK. It is showing at the Hackney Picturehouse as part of the East End Film Festival tomorrow. Crumbs remains my favourite film of the year so far - I definitely recommend seeing it if you're in the area.
     In terms of the interview, the length means that it has been split into two parts. Part 1 went up today and I'll add an additional link to this post when the 2nd part is online:

• Subverting old tales from the future, part 1
• Subverting old tales from the future, part 2

Festival Report: D'A Festival 2015

    I've written a report about the 5th edition of D'A Festival and it's over at Mediático (click here). As I've reviewed most of the films that I mention elsewhere, I've gone into a bit more detail about the festival itself before highlighting some of the standout titles / groups. It was the first time that I'd been to a film festival outside of the UK and - although I had my doubts initially (mainly to do with the expense of travel and accommodation) - I had a great time and I hope that my enthusiasm in relation to the films I saw (and the experience I had) has come across in what I've written on the blog and elsewhere. It was an adventure, and I'm glad I went for it.
    There are a couple of outstanding pieces to be completed (or, indeed, started) in relation to D'A Festival - I still need to translate my interview with Crumbs director Miguel Llansó (lack of time since I've been back at work has been the delay on that one), and I'm intending to get that done by the start of July because Crumbs will be screening at the East End Film Festival (1-12 July). That's the only pressing thing that I need to get done. As I've said before, I'm intending to write about the (Im)Possible Futures films or recent Spanish sci-fi more generally, and at some point I also want to write a post about docu-fiction No todo es vigilia, which was a film I really liked but I didn't review it (because Eye for Film already had a review) and as a result it's ended up a bit left behind on my 'to do' list. But those things will have to wait until later in the summer because I'm now gearing up for the Edinburgh Film Festival (posts forthcoming) and I also have something about documentaries that has been developing in my mind for a while, so I'd like to write that one sooner rather than later (certainly it will be my priority after Edinburgh). So that's it for my coverage of D'A Festival 2015 for now.

Interview: Ion de Sosa and Chema García Ibarra

Sueñan los androides

    One slightly unexpected experience at D'A Festival was that I had the opportunity to interview people in person (I tried to interview someone at a film festival last year but wasn't insistent enough in following it up, and so the chance was lost). In this case, I had asked about the possibility of interviewing specific people before I headed to the festival but didn't find out whether or not I could until I arrived in Barcelona. The delay in me starting to write reviews while I was there was effectively the time I spent preparing questions (which had to wait until I had seen the relevant films as well).
    The first of these in-person interviews related to Sueñan los androides / Androids Dream and can be read over at Eye for Film - here. In fact, it was actually two interviews because I ended up interviewing director Ion de Sosa and co-writer Chema García Ibarra separately, but as I asked them the same questions - about Sueñan los androides and also Spanish cinema more generally - I've put their answers together in that piece. I will be returning to Sueñan los androides when I write something more detailed about the (Im)Possible Futures section - and I may expand that to be about Spanish sci-fi more generally, in which case I will also include Uranes (written and directed by Chema García Ibarra).
    Conducting interviews in person has been a learning experience, and one which will no doubt continue in the future. For example, in contrast to interviews conducted by email, I had the chance to respond to their answers with follow up questions, but in this instance I stuck to my original questions too rigidly. That was a confidence issue on my part given that we were speaking Spanish and it was the first time I'd ever interviewed anyone, in any language (yes, I decided to go for the full-blown baptism of fire). As I said to each of the people I interviewed in Barcelona (I still need to translate my interview with Crumbs director Miguel Llansó) - I can understand the majority of what is said to me in Spanish, but sometimes I can't find the right words when I want to express myself / respond. So that hindered me a bit - although they were all very patient when I did stray from the questions I had written down and had to grasp for the right words - but I think that I did the best I could, and I'm pleased that I went for it because I would have regretted it if I hadn't. Translating the interviews (I recorded them) has also been interesting from a language comprehension perspective because it's not enough to understand the gist if you're directly quoting someone (listening to myself speaking Spanish has also underlined that I should try to find some conversation classes again - I read or listen to Spanish on a daily basis but I don't have many opportunities to speak it), so I've had to work on both picking out their precise words (which is something I don't have to worry about when the interview is done via email because I receive the words in written form) and a more nuanced understanding of the specific words used.

Interview: Xurxo Chirro

Vikingland

    I contacted director Xurxo Chirro a couple of months ago when I was writing about 'Un impulso colectivo' and needed to track down a way of seeing Une histoire seule. So, when I realised that his film Vikingland (which I had already seen) was screening at Iberodocs, I contacted him again and asked whether he had the time to answer some questions about the film via email - he kindly agreed, and the resulting interview has been published over at Eye for Film (here).

    Where I've had the opportunity to interview directors in the past month, besides asking about the specific film they're promoting, I've also asked about 'el otro cine español' (obviously a topic of ongoing interest for me). In this case, I also asked about a more regional phenomenon - New Galician Cinema (Novo Cinema Galego). I've seen a number of films pertaining to this group but they were presented in isolation, so I don't know very much about the group collectively or how it came into being - i.e. why has there been this cinematic flourishing in the region. So the interview was enlightening for me in that context. But Xurxo's comment about 'el otro cine español' being like an archipelago with filmmakers either working alone or in smaller clusters (rather than a collective movement) also chimes with what I observed in Barcelona, and some of what filmmakers there said in response to similar questions on the general topic (in essence, I think there was another collective cluster detectable among certain films at the D'A Festival this year, in terms of filmmakers who are actively collaborating with each other and who share perspectives and cinematic attitudes). 
    As I've said on here before, I find the overall shape of 'el otro cine español' (as it is written about in Spanish publications) difficult to approach in an analytical way because the range of filmmakers included is broad and unwieldy. My method of breaking it down into a manageable starting point has been to concentrate on the documentaries, but I'm now wondering whether it might be more useful to identify a few of the concentrated clusters of filmmakers and use them as a starting point. I don't think this particularly contradicts what I've written so far on the subject; it is a refinement of my perspective and methods. But I will ponder this some more while I write up things from Barcelona - and I also have a specific topic I want to explore in relation to documentaries by filmmakers such as Víctor Moreno and Pablo Llorca, among others - so this won't be an immediate change in focus, but I may start to change my approach.

Iberodocs, Edinburgh: Arraianos and Vikingland

    The first of my reviews relating to Iberodocs have now gone online. Both films are part of the festival's 'Focus on Galicia' strand drawing attention to both the phenomenon of New Galician Cinema and a particular trend for documentary fictions.

• Arraianos (Eloy Enciso, 2012) - a poetic portrait of the borderlands between Galicia and Portugal. My review is here.
• Vikingland (Xurxo Chirro, 2011) - footage filmed by a Galician sailor who was working on a ferry between Germany and Denmark in the early 1990s is arranged to echo Melville's Moby Dick. My review is here.

Neither is a straightforwardly conventional film and would be rich texts to explore if you were considering issues of identity (personal, regional, and national), work, metaphysics, the natural world (and our place in it), and emigration - they have enough going on that I could write another review of each, focussed on entirely different elements. Both are worth seeking out if you get the opportunity. Arraianos is available on DVD (with optional English subtitles) directly from the people who made it - here.
    My other Iberodocs reviews will be of films screening in Glasgow, so I will write a separate post for them next weekend. I'll also write another post later today, to link to the interview I did with Xurxo Chirro.

(Im)Possible Futures: Sueñan los androides, El arca de Noé, and Crumbs

The (Im)Possible Futures strand of the D'A Festival included six features and nine shorts. I am going to write something about the theme - I went to the festival's roundtable discussion on the subject - and the films as a collection, but in essence what they represent is 'low voltage' (or realist) sci-fi showing futures made plausible by their connections to our current realities. I'll be reviewing some of the shorts over the next few days, but these are my reviews of the three Spanish features in the section:

• Sueñan los androides / Androids Dream (Ion de Sosa, 2014) - an experimental and dream-like take on Benidorm in 2052. My review is here. I interviewed Ion de Sosa and co-writer Chema García Ibarra (director of Uranes, which was part of last year's Un impulso colectivo strand) in Barcelona, so that interview should also appear later in the week (depending on how long it takes me to transcribe/translate Spanish).
• El arca de Noé / Noah's Ark (Adán Aliaga and David Valero, 2014) - a sweet-natured comedy on inter-dimensional travel as a possible escape route from the economic crisis. My review is here.
• Crumbs (Miguel Llansó, 2015) - a surreal quest across the epic Ethiopian landscape in search of Father Christmas and answers relating to a spaceship. It was my favourite film of the festival and my review is here. I also interviewed Miguel Llansó at the festival, and that should likewise appear later in the week (my transcribing/translation skills permitting).

I will create a separate post with links to the reviews of the short films once I've started writing them, and the same for the interviews. In the meantime, Eye for Film is now collating all of my coverage of D'A Festival on one page - here.

A Collective Impulse: an overview

This post has been moved to my new blog - you can find it here.

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I'd like to thank the following people for allowing me access to their work: Luis López Carrasco (twice over), Xurxo Chirro, Ramiro Ledo, Víctor Moreno (for giving me access to Edificio España before the DVD was available), Juan Rayos, Lourdes Pérez at Producción El Viaje (and Jonay García at Digital 104 for passing that request along), and Deica audiovisual.
If you click on the 'el otro cine español' label below, you will see posts relating to my ongoing, broader project.

Mini Project: Un impulso colectivo

    Since early 2014 I've been seeking out films that fall into the nebulous and ever-expanding category of 'el otro cine español' and thinking about how I might approach writing about them collectively. Documentary films within this category have been my main focus for more than six months now although I've also simultaneously drifted into looking at documentaries more broadly (i.e. outside of Spain and from a range of eras), which has made 'progress' slower than I'd intended. I have an idea of how to group a particular set of documentaries together in order to write about them, but I've still got a few more to track down and watch before I get started.
    I've also continued watching Spanish cinema generally (I will write something about La isla mínima, honest. No, really, I will) but also other 'otro cine español' films that don't fit within my current documentary focus (I'm hoping to get around to watching Magical Girl and Hermosa juventud in the next month). As I've said in previous posts, it's such a disparate and unwieldy collection of films and filmmakers that it's difficult to know where to begin (last July I explained why I've started with the documentaries) and how to break it down into more manageable sub-sections. But it recently occurred to me that the 'Un impulso colectivo' [A Collective Impulse] section at last year's D'A - Festival Internacional de Cinema D'Autor de Barcelona was precisely designed to give an overview of this cinema being made on the margins. So in the build-up to the D'A festival announcing their 2015 line-up (they have already said that there won't be a similar section this year but that homegrown films will feature across all sections of the programme), I thought I'd take a look back at the fourteen films programmed by Carlos Losilla (the section takes its name from his September 2013 article in Caimán Cuadernos de Cine) in 2014. Taken together the films stand as a panoramic snapshot of Spanish cinema(s) now on the move (collectively and as individual filmmakers). The fourteen films are [UPDATE 03/04/15 - I'm currently writing the overview piece but explaining what each film is about is cluttering it up. My solution is that I'm going to add a brief outline of each film below and include a link to this post at the start of the overview]:

• Árboles / Trees (dir. Colectivo Los Hijos [Javier Fernández Vázquez, Luis López Carrasco, Natalia Marín Sancho]). An essay film combining the storytelling surrounding colonialism with an exploration of different architectural spaces and how they relate to their inhabitants.
• Las aventuras de Lily ojos de gato / The Adventures of Cat-Eyed Lily (dir. Yonay Boix). Follows the eponymous Lily on a carousing night out with friends in Madrid as she tries to get herself together and resolve personal problems.
• Cenizas / Ashes (dir. Carlos Balbuena). A stunningly photographed, black and white, and near wordless tale of a man returning to his home town in the aftermath of a family funeral and exploring the surrounding area.
• Edificio España / The Building (dir. Víctor Moreno). A documentary recording the renovation of the monumental Edificio España, the international workforce carrying out the work, and the beginning of the economic crisis.
• El Futuro / The Future (dir. Luis López Carrasco). A house party in the aftermath of the 1982 Socialist victory with the generation who mistook that election for an end in itself.
• Une histoire seule (dir. Xurxo Chirro & Aguinaldo Fructuoso). Two friends join forces via Skype to make a film about Geneva inspired by Jean-Luc Godard.
• Ilusión / Hope (dir. Daniel Castro). Intending to give some hope to his fellow countrymen in such trying times, a writer-director aims to make a musical (Los Pactos de la Moncloa) about the political pacts made during the Transition.
• Paradiso (dir. Omar A. Razzak). A documentary about the day-to-day running of the Duque de Alba, the last Sala X (porn cinema) in Madrid, and the interactions between projectionist Rafael, soon-to-retire box-office operator Luisa, and the cinema's clientele.
• Los primeros días / The First Days (dir. Juan Rayos). A documentary recording the rehearsals and performances of a play written for adults but here performed by four ten year olds - over the course of two years they grow up before our eyes.
• Slimane (dir. José A. Alayón). When young immigrants come of age they're forced to leave the child care centres that have been their homes without any further assistance. Homeless, Slimane and his friends have to find safe places to sleep, money to get by on, and ways to kill time.
• Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (dir. Jordi Morató). A documentary telling the story of a man who built his own jungle by the side of a highway, and how he rebuilt and destroyed it three times.
• El triste olor de la carne / The Sad Smell of Flesh (dir. Cristóbal Arteaga). Alfredo has been keeping up appearances since losing his job but over the course of one morning has to try to avert the repossession of his home and his family discovering the truth.
• Uranes (dir. Chema García Ibarra). A deadpan tale of extraterrestrials, grandparents, and dark goings-on in the countryside.
• Vidaextra / ExtraLife (dir. Ramiro Ledo). The September 2010 General Strike in Barcelona blends with Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance to feed into an overnight discussion between five anonymous friends who are trying to oppose the state of things.

    I'm in the process of working my way through watching them (I actually saw four of them - El Futuro, Edificio España, Sobre la marxa, and Cenizas - last year). Some of them are available commercially (either as DVDs or VOD), but the majority aren't - in those cases, I've contacted the filmmakers or production companies in order to access them. At the moment I'm theoretically - one DVD has yet to arrive - able to (re)watch twelve of the fourteen (the missing two are among the ones I've seen previously). My intention is to write an overview of them as a group within the next couple of weeks, and then possibly write about individual films in more detail later on (it will depend on how they fit within the other things I'm researching). To be continued...

Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (Jordi Morató, 2014)

My review of Sobre la marxa - as seen at the Leeds International Film Festival last weekend - is up over at Eye for Film, here. I'll return to the film on here when I start pulling together my thoughts on the various Spanish documentaries I've been watching in the last few months.

Edificio España / The Building (Víctor Moreno, 2013)

This post has moved to my new blog - you can find it here.

Plan of Action: Documentaries and Blurred Borders

   It has been my intention in the last couple of months (I've kept getting waylaid by other things, as is my habit) to start imposing some kind of order on to my 2014 project ('El otro cine español'). The filmmakers who are being labelled with that tag are a disparate and unwieldy bunch - while I'm trying to work out who I would classify as belonging to this 'movement' (and how I will define 'it', and my own classifications) it seems sensible to divide them up into more manageable groups, even if I later draw the lines in different places.
    As I've previously said, I have some qualms with Caimán Cuaderno de Cine's criteria for their list. The actual articles they've published on the theme are more inclusive (so, even more filmmakers are mentioned, but that makes more sense to me - i.e. there is a thread that can be followed further back than CdC's arbitrary (to me) one year period). I've been reading my way through the articles and making translated notes (it would appear that the only way information will stick in my mind is in English), or in the case of Carlos Losilla's key article ('Un impulso colectivo', Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, September 2013, pp.6-8) I've written a full translation. As a side note, I'd like to say that the enthusiasm and excitement of the Spanish critics (in CdC but also websites such as Blogs&Docs) who have been writing about - and championing - these films (and particularly in what they've written about the newer group of filmmakers as being a group of people united by the conviction that you have to make images of the world and of ourselves with the aim of changing it and changing us (Losilla 2014: 22)) is compelling and infectious, and manages to even survive my broken up manner of translation (i.e. having to stop to look a word up in a dictionary when I'm not sure I've understood something properly). I've still got articles to work my way through, but I now have a better idea of the key themes or strands to what constitutes this 'other' cinema and also a view on which filmmakers I think need to be added to my considerations.
    I've come to the conclusion that documentaries are where I need to start - because of the number of documentaries being made by these filmmakers (and there are a lot of filmmakers who switch back and forth between making documentaries and making fiction films, which seems unusual to me because I can't think of many examples of this happening extensively elsewhere - Werner Herzog is one of the few names who springs to mind but please feel free to inform me of others), the manner in which documentaries more obviously fit with the apparent impetus and intentions of this 'movement' (I'm not 100% clear on this aspect at the moment, but that's my instinct), and also because it is some (but not all) of the more straightforwardly 'fictional' filmmakers (they make more or less exclusively fiction features - I'm not suggesting that they themselves are fictional, although that would make for an interesting digression) who I have more difficulty seeing quite how they fit into the larger collective. I've said 'straightforwardly' fictional because there are also a group of films that blur the borders between documentary and fiction - for example, in La plaga (Neus Ballús, 2013) the characters are local people playing fictionalised versions of themselves - and I'm going to include those films with the documentaries, at least in this initial period of research. So I need to do some reading on documentaries generally, but also look at documentary traditions within Spain as well.
    That almost inevitably means looking at filmmakers who date back to earlier periods but I don't want to get bogged down in the past too much, so I'm restricting myself to two antecedents for the time being - Joaquim Jordá (because he is frequently referred to in relation to this contemporary 'other' cinema) and Pere Portabella (because his films are clearly 'other', his filmography includes documentaries (some of them - particularly the political documentaries - key works in Spanish cinema), and I've recently watched all of them - rule no.4: always include something on your 'to do' list that you have already done, so that you can cross it off straight away). At this stage I'm not intending to write about either of them - I just want to watch as many of their films as I can get hold of, so that I have a better idea of connections Spanish critics might be seeing. It may be that as I read more, I come across more names or films that I'd like to see - but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that it's the people working now who I'm wanting to investigate and write about.
    Who makes the first cut? Again, I'm sure that more names will occur to me - or cross my radar - once I get going, but I think that Jose Luis Guerin (not on CdC's list) and Isaki Lacuesta (on CdC's list) both have to be on my list without question. The two of them move back and forth between documentary and fiction (or blur the borders in an individual film) and they've also got established careers, so there is a trail to be followed and they possibly act as a bridge between cinematic past and present (again, that's just my instinct at the moment). The other filmmakers I'm intending to look at initially are mainly people who are on CdC's list (with a few additional ones who have already crossed my path), most of whom have fairly short filmographies, but inclusion (or not) will partly depend on whether I can get hold of / view their films. It is about the films, after all. Documentaries actually seem to be easier to track down than some of the fiction films (another reason to start with them), so I do have access in some form or other to the majority of films in my initial selection (see the notes in the image above).
    That's where I'm starting - I don't know how frequently I will write about the films on here, but I will continue to at least give an indication of what I've been watching. I'm doing general reading at the moment and then I'm intending to spend some time just watching the films, before doing some more specific research. I'm taking notes when I view things already, so I may write them up in brief batches or something - but I'm not setting a schedule for including stuff on here, and in terms of my overall schedule for the project, I need a better idea of what I'm dealing with before I start setting myself deadlines. To be continued...

Wounded...but not dead yet: La pantalla herida and the state of Spanish cinema

    I've been researching Spanish cinema for more than a decade and in that time it has almost continuously been described (within Spain, at least) as being in 'crisis'. That's sometimes a relative term - the obsession with box office statistics and Spanish cinema's fluctuating share of their home market is often written about in negative terms (e.g. 'down 5% on last year') without giving context to put the figures in perspective. For example, there were so-called slumps in 1996, 2000, 2002 but all three followed years that had generated substantial increases in takings (Ansola González 2003: 49), something that was repeated between 2006 (a bumper year for Spanish cinema) and 2007 (in which only El orfanato made a serious dent in the Spanish box office). But since around 2009 events have taken on a darker hue and in the last couple of years a 'perfect storm' of not-so-perfect conditions (consumer habits have changed but a series of controversial measures by successive governments have also had a crippling effect) have combined to knock the Spanish film industry off its feet with little sign of a coordinated or sustained fightback.
    It's a positive sign that I've recently seen two Spanish documentaries that look specifically at the changes that Spanish cinema is undergoing - BARATOmetrajes 2.0 (which I wrote about here) and La pantalla herida / The Wounded Screen (Luís María Ferrández, 2014). Taken together they give the impression that something constructive might transpire because people are starting to listen as well as talk (those working in the industry, at least - in the past week, the Spanish government has shown itself happy to blend the vindictive with the economically stupid: reaction here, here, and here). Luís María Ferrández organised a series of discussions - in the spirit of the 1955 Conversations of Salamanca - with sets of people from different sections of the film industry (a full list of participants is below) and filmed the resulting conversations about finance, production, distribution, and exhibition.
    All of the participants agree that Spanish cinema is in dire straits, and that this state of being has been allowed to continue for too long - either by being ignored or simply not being dealt with effectively - but beyond that initial point of agreement, the film expands into diverse discussions as to the causes of the malaise and what possible solutions might be. This diversity is where it gets really interesting because while there is a general sense of frustration or exasperation (in relation to certain issues, not least 'subvenciones', people are fed up with having to explain themselves and / or justify their livelihoods) - and at times a sad air of defeat - there is also anger and the sparks of people being willing to fight. So, where to begin?
    Education is mentioned several times in the context of cinema not being valued - one illustration given is that Spanish politicians are photographed at football matches and tennis games in the pursuit of votes, but you won't see them at the opera or cinema - and that to change that attitude some kind of audiovisual appreciation needs to filter into the school curriculum. 'Culture' is the operative word here; culture is more than entertainment, it is part of our identities, enriching lives, and it is also the manner in which a country exists in the outside world (through the images it generates). In the Spanish context, it's partly about countering the attitude of rejecting one's own culture - Spain does not have the reputation of respecting its own artists - and the proportion of the Spanish public who won't view a Spanish film simply because it is Spanish. The stereotype is that "Spanish cinema is the Civil War seen from the point of view of the Republicans" (statistics on how few Civil War films are made in Spain are repeated several times in the course of the film with great testiness). Politics rears its head at this point - is Spanish cinema too politicised? 
    There are proponents of the 'shut up and sing' attitude towards politically-inclined actors in the mix but I've never seen why artists should hide their political opinions - especially if they have the opportunity to give voice to sections of the community that are not being listened to (if the Spanish government feels publicly humiliated by the vocal criticism of its domestic and / or foreign policies that often occurs at the Goya Awards, they can rest assured that the right-wing press goes after the people in question with vehement intent the following day). Imanol Uribe shares the anecdote of a taxi driver who told him that by making their politics clear, those in Spanish cinema automatically set themselves up to be rejected by 50% of the population. I don't think it's that straightforward - I don't think the rejection of your home culture is (party) political - because although those Spanish films that are big box office hits (I'm thinking of the Torrente films or the likes of El orfanato, or most recently Ocho apellidos vascos) tend to be 'genre films' (for want of a better phrase - all films belong to one genre or other) with little in the way of overt politics, if the public were making their filmgoing choices on party-political lines then surely those few Spanish filmmakers at the other end of the political spectrum would have a better showing at the box office (on the basis that the Left are spoilt for choice, which would presumably split their audience, but the Right have little to choose from)? Did I miss Holmes & Watson: Madrid Days (2012) setting the Spanish box office alight?
    What does come across is a sense of frustration that - as an industry - they are not very good at countering misrepresentations that circulate in the press or society more generally. The discussions get most heated with the topic of subventions because it is here that there seems to be the greatest discrepancy between representation and reality. As many of them point out - a) it's a line of credit that has to be repaid, not simply a handout, b) numerous other industries, such as car manufacture and (bizarrely) the Catholic Church, receive far bigger subsidies than cinema, c) the money is reinvested in the local economy and generates jobs, d) all countries support their cinema (this goes back to the point of culture being more than entertainment). In the current economic climate, particularly in austerity-ridden Spain, public money being invested in cinema is not popular - but is that partly because of how it is represented (feckless Lefties running amok on taxpayers' money)? As producer Sandra Hermida urges, should they not be taking out full page ads in national newspapers proclaiming their achievements, the number of jobs created, and money invested locally? They generally need to be more proactive in countering misinformation. 
    Although the press is criticised for not supporting Spanish cinema, to the detriment of sustaining a connection with the Spanish public, I don't know that Spain is that different to other European countries (with the possible exception of France - which is held up a paragon of cinematic virtue more than once). Maybe my view is skewed because I mainly read the specialist press and perhaps the wider Spanish press give it little attention. But, for instance, how often does Empire put a British film on its cover? Sight & Sound probably has British covers (and coverage) more frequently (or focuses on British filmmakers, if not British films) but the mainstream likes of Empire and Total Film rarely put homegrown talent on the front cover and they're unlikely to get a multipage spread inside either. In contrast, in 2013 Fotogramas had 5 Spanish covers (which is unprecedented in the 9 years I've had a subscription), Cinemanía had 2 (which is 2 more than 2012), and at the more erudite end of the market Caimán Cuadernos de Cine had Spanish films on their cover 3 times and extensive coverage of what they're championing as 'el otro cine español' - so the specialist press in Spain is reacting to the free-fall being experienced by the Spanish film industry and attempting to actively promote the films it produces. Admittedly I don't know what their circulation figures are like, but it just seems a little simplistic to say that the Spanish press don't do enough to support Spanish cinema (although I would argue that in terms of the general press, and their attitudes towards the film industry, this probably is an area where politics come into play - as a group, and as individuals, 'los del cine' are attacked with regularity in the right-wing press).
    It's obviously difficult to change the structure of an industry, but most of the participants think that change is necessary - especially in terms of how money is distributed - and that even the most romantic ideal of the cinema needs to have an industry supporting it. Ángeles González Sinde and Agustín Díaz Yanes propose that the committees that distribute the money need to have people with experience of filmmaking and a better eye for talent, pointing out that the first films by Álex de la Iglesia and Alejandro Amenábar were produced by established directors (Pedro Almodóvar and José Luis Cuerda respectively) who recognised nascent talent and took steps to nurture it. The French system, wherein a percentage of the price of all cinema tickets feeds back into the French film industry, is held up as a possible model, and the price of tickets is generally seen as something that needs to be looked at more closely. On the one hand, tickets prices are seen as expensive (although as Rubén Ochandiano points out, people will spend more money buying a gin and tonic in a bar), but on the other nothing in life is free (piracy is also touched upon, with director Miguel Santesmases pointing to research that concluded that those who pirate the most are also those who are most willing to buy when given the opportunity - so accessibility is also an issue (BARATOmetrajes looks at that issue in a bit more detail)). Multiple contributors argue that the subventions should be aimed at the ticket prices rather than production costs, to encourage people back into cinemas, with producer Luis Manso suggesting that tickets prices for Spanish films could be cheaper than for US productions - not because their films aren't as good, but as a way of encouraging the Spanish public to see them (he also notes that it is impossible for Spanish productions to compete with Hollywood in terms of promotion or the number of copies of a film distributed). 
    One of the questions Luís María Ferrández asks is whether people can continue to make a living making cinema in Spain. The arts are a field with a strong vocational aspect and producer Pilar Robla counsels that each individual has to have a conversation with themselves about what working conditions they will accept, but the consensus seems to be that fewer and fewer people can 'live' on making films - and certainly there is not enough work to support the number of graduates coming out of various kinds of film schools. 'Cine low cost' is discussed in this context, as although the democratisation of technology has enabled filmmakers to make films without help from 'normal' sources, the participants here say that it's not a set-up that will allow them to continue making films and nobody earns (or is properly protected) on those productions (again, BARATOmetrajes contains some different points of view on this aspect). Producer/director Luís Miñarro argues that although crowdfunding can achieve specific things, it is not the basis of an industry. Likewise, talk of cooperatives - although useful in difficult circumstances - also highlights that you can't make a living long-term in those situations.
    If all of this sounds slightly depressing - and as I've already said, there is an air of sadness to the film - the vocational element of artistic endeavour is where hope remains. Too many people can't imagine a life without culture, without cinema: while people still have passion for film, cinema will survive. What this documentary suggests though is that cinema will have to utilise its capacity for innovation and creativity in order to adapt to the changing circumstances it finds itself in, and that there need to be more conversations and more communication within (and outside) the Spanish film industry if it is going to get back on its feet.
    Despite this turning into something of an essay, I've barely summarised what's discussed in La pantalla herida and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in contemporary Spanish film. It's available to rent on Vimeo (here) - there are no English subtitles, but if you have any Spanish at all, have a go (I'm by no means fluent but I found most of it easy to follow - it helps if you have an awareness of the issues under discussion).



The participants: José Luis Acosta (president of SGAE, writer and director), Belén Bernuy (producer), Marisa Castelo (intellectual property lawyer), Fernando Cayo (actor), Raúl Cerezo (president of the Academy of Spanish Short Films), Jesús Ciordia (actors' agent), Eduardo Chapero Jackson (director), Agustín Díaz Yanes (writer and director), Karra Elejalde (actor), Javier Elorrieta (producer and director), Valentín Fernández Tobau (writer and president of abcguionistas), Gustavo Ferrada (producer), Gil Parrondo (art director), Enrique González Macho (president of the Academy of Cinema), Ángeles González Sinde (ex-Minister of Culture, ex-president of the Academy of Cinema, director and writer), Fernando Guillén Cuervo (actor, producer, and director), Sandra Hermida (producer), Antonio Hernández (director), Carlos Jiménez (director of the Museo del Cine in Madrid), Julia Juániz (editor), Juan Ramón Gómez Fabra (president of the distributors of Spain), Enrique López Lavigne (producer), Joaquín Manchado (camera operator and DoP), Luis Manso (producer), Fele Martínez (actor), Luis Miñarro (producer and director), Pepe Nieto (composer), Rubén Ochandiano (actor), Lourdes de Orduña (costume), Pedro Pérez (ex-president of FAPAE - federación de productores audiovisuales), Félix Piñuela (director of Versión española, TVE), Paco Ramos (producer), Diego Rodríguez (president of the platform of festivals of the community of Madrid), Pilar Robla (producer and president of APPA (Asociación profesionales producción audiovisual)), Gerardo Sánchez (director of Días de cine, TVE), Miguel Santesmases (director), Susana de la Sierra (Director General of the ICAA (Ministry of Culture)), Hugo Silva (actor), Imanol Uribe (director), Manolo Velasco (camera operator and DoP), Nacho Vigalondo (director), Luis Zahera (actor).

Stella cadente / Falling Star (Lluís Miñarro, 2014)

My Eye for Film review of Lluís Miñarro's Stella cadente (2014) can be found here.

This was the only Spanish film I managed to see while I was at the Edinburgh film festival this past weekend but, if you are in the vicinity of Edinburgh this week, I'd recommend My Name Is Salt (Farida Pacha, 2013) (my review for EFF is here), Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, 2013), and Garnet's Gold (Ed Perkins, 2014).
Stella cadente is one of those films that has so much going on that connections slowly become apparent as it percolates through your mind later, so I do have more to say beyond my review - I'll come back to it on here soon.

Mercado de futuros / Futures Market (Mercedes Álvarez, 2011)

I had a weekend of watching Spanish documentaries including La pantalla herida / The Wounded Screen (Luís María Ferrández, 2014), which discusses the current sorry state of the Spanish film industry - I'm intending to write something about that one in the next week or so, but it may have to wait until I get back from a few days at the Edinburgh international film festival (which starts this week).

Blow Horn (Lluís Miñarro, 2010)

Available to view online with English subtitles here. 

La leyenda del tiempo (Isaki Lacuesta, 2006)

My viewing habits are a bit skewed at the moment because my Filmin subscription is about to expire and I won't be renewing it in the immediate future - so I'm trying to watch the films they have that are difficult to get hold of on DVD (or that aren't currently available on DVD).

Petit Indi / Little Indi (Marc Recha, 2009)

Cravan vs. Cravan (Isaki Lacuesta, 2002)

El mundo que fue (y el que es) / The World That Was (and That Is) (Pablo Llorca, 2011)

Most of Llorca's films are available to view for free (without subtitles at the moment, but PLAT are due to launch an English site soon) here. I'm intending to write something about his films once I've watched a few more of them.

I've drifted off course a bit in the last week. I will return to El futuro, as previously indicated, but I've also finished the Pere Portabella boxset and am working out how to write about that collection of films.

BARATOmetrajes 2.0 (Daniel San Román and Hugo Serra, 2014) and cine low cost

    This timely (for me) documentary examines the phenomenon of 'nuevo cine low cost Español' / new low cost Spanish cinema, which has grown exponentially in the last couple of years. I'm going to take the opportunity of talking about the documentary to expand on the issue of 'cine low cost' as mentioned briefly in previous posts. Obviously there is an economic and social context to the increase in low cost cinema being made - austerity measures in Spain have seen reductions in government funding of cinema, and those kinds of schemes aren't always feasible for films made on the margins as some of them utilise expected audience numbers, which are not guaranteed or reliably predictable for independent cinema - but technological advances in recent years have also democratised production: more than one of the interviewees notes that you can make a film on your phone these days. However, technology alone is not enough to get a film made and seen.
    Interviewees in BARATOmetrajes 2.0 include directors, producers, distributors, festival programmers, and journalists, collectively taking the attitude that if you have an idea, a script, and friends who are willing to lend a hand, you can make a film - cinema is no longer the preserve of only the well-connected or the wealthy. However, there are evident tensions in relation to the idea of relying on friends - for example, producer Tina Olivares states that she would never embark on a film presuming that it was going to be low budget because that contains an assumption that she won't be able to pay people properly, something that she is unhappy about. Several of the directors interviewed were clearly uncomfortable about not being able to pay people (or themselves) properly for their work - this low cost cinema could still turn into the preserve of the rich if they're the only ones able to get by without a salary. 
    Funding in general is problematic - the films discussed were generally made for (low) five-figure sums but even that was hard won, often through appeals to friends and family, and increasingly via crowdfunding platforms (there is disagreement within the documentary as to the limits of crowdfunding in terms of how long it can remain viable as a funding source). The film explains the controversial system of 'subvenciones' (controversial in part because of how it's misunderstood - sometimes deliberately so when political point-scoring is going on - and the common misconception that the money goes into the filmmakers' pockets), and how it is loaded against smaller budget films, in a concise and clearly-illustrated manner. 
    Lack of money can have a knock-on effect on the aesthetic of a film, which may suit those who see these 'limitations' as adequate for the ideas they have and the speed at which they wish to work (several suggest that technical proficiency is overrated), but others evidently have aspirations for more ambitious productions. Relatedly, there is a discussion as to whether 'cine low cost' constitutes a genre, because there are certain recurrent characteristics (mainly dictated by the budget restrictions), chief among which is often what the film looks like - the films used as examples within the documentary looked quite different to each other stylistically, but others that I have seen online have a more generically lo-fi appearance. In terms of what I've read about cine low cost to date, it is generally spoken of as if it were a genre, which is part of the reason why it's separated out from the so-called 'other Spanish cinema' - although there are points of overlap insofar as both are termed 'independent' cinema (one interviewee asks "independent from what?") and usually low budget (although 'low' is always relative in financial terms). My project focusses on 'the other Spanish cinema' but I need to work out where the dividing line is and why films are put in one category or the other - are the 'other' films more ambitious or experimental? Or is it something else that differentiates them? Aesthetically the 'other' cinema encompasses a broad range of styles and methods of filmmaking - is this distinct from cine low cost? How do the two types/movements/phenomena connect with Spain's current social context?
     What I took from the documentary is that getting the film made is not actually the hardest part - getting it screened and seen by audiences is (another overlap between the two groups). Although technology has democratised production, the same is not true of distribution or exhibition. The Spanish market cannot cope with the volume of Spanish productions being made - for example, of the 107 Spanish films made in 2000, 3% never saw a commercial release; by 2007, with 172 Spanish productions, the proportion of unreleased films had risen to 14% (source: Yáñez 2008 and 2009 - I haven't managed to find more recent statistics on this specific aspect yet). Independent distributors are struggling in the current economic climate - Spain's biggest independent, Alta Films, a distributor and exhibitor of smaller / independent titles (whether American, European, or Spanish), shut its distribution arm last year and also had to close most of its cinemas. Meanwhile larger chains are also struggling due to the combination of the rise in IVA (which rose from 8% to 21% on entertainment in September 2012) and the cost of switching to digital (Spain is running behind many other European markets in that area), alongside people spending less on 'luxuries' - multiplexes are also closing down. In that environment, the bigger chains are less likely to take a chance on a smaller film that isn't a big draw for audiences. 
    In response, cinema is moving online - Márgenes, Filmin, and other VOD platforms are mentioned (I noticed that the littlesecretfilm initiative isn't included, which is a bit strange because it fits with the subject matter and they have been one of the most visible platforms for cine low cost, although I guess that their 'rules' set them apart), as is the possibility of filmmakers making their films pay-per-view through their own websites. El mundo es nuestro (Alfonso Sánchez, 2012) and Carmina o revienta (Paco León, 2012) are held up as (differing) examples of new and experimental distribution tactics that paid dividends, and the use of social media to generate publicity that they didn't have the funds to buy in the traditional sense.
     The issue of piracy, never far away in relation to Spanish cinema, also appears with members of the public offering the opinion that the Spanish won't pay for something that they can get for free. The low cost filmmakers admit to mixed feelings about their films being pirated because, while they would like to get paid, they would also like their films to be seen - the price of cinema tickets and DVDs (the former are broadly comparable with the UK, perhaps slightly more expensive, but the latter are noticeably more pricey in Spain) are seen as exorbitant in the current economic climate.
     BARATOmetrajes 2.0 is an interesting documentary that covers multiple aspects of the cine low cost phenomenon and includes a variety of opinions - quite often without an overall consensus, which serves to illustrate the diversity of people involved as well as the range of problems and possible solutions that they're encountering. Although it's not quite the topic I'm looking at, it's a good primer of what's going on alongside it, and is definitely worth watching if you have an interest in non-mainstream cinema. 

I watched it at Filmin, where it is showing for a few more days as part of the Atlántida Film Fest, but you can buy the DVD from the filmmakers' website - although note that it doesn't have subtitles.   

References:
Yáñez, J. (2008) - ' El cine español que no estrena', Cahiers du cinema España, January, no.8, pp.50-52.
Yáñez, J. (2009) - 'El cine español de 2007 que no llegó a las salas', Cahiers du cinema España, February, no.20, pp.52-53.