It's not the Cannes red carpet, much less the Oscars, but last night a few well-known faces paraded along the red carpet of the Verdi cinemas. Actors such as Eduard Fernández, Macarena García, Clara Segura, Nuria Gago, José Corbacho, Carles Francino, Mercedes Sampietro and Leticia Dolera welcomed the eighth edition of the BCN Film Fest, which will last until April 26 and which awaits arrival in the coming days of big names in cinema such as Meg Ryan, Vincent Perez or the legendary singer Joan Báez, who will chat with the public in a live connection from Los Angeles.
April in Barcelona is very special thanks to spring and Sant Jordi that waters the city with books and roses. Seven years ago, the Verdi cinemas team decided to turn that duet into a triangle that also included cinema. The BCN Film Fest took off timidly, but now that commitment, which programs films that draw on literature with special zeal, has been consolidated because “the relationship between cinema and writing is an eternal romance that has no end,” says the director. of the contest for five years, Conxita Casanovas.
“The idea of a contest that has books as its central axis is bearing good fruit. There is an audience that is already waiting for us because they knew us in other editions and to whom we do not have to explain what the story is about. "Today I was walking down the street with the program and they took it out of my hands," adds the person in charge of the contest. But the BCN Film Fest wants to go for more spectators, for young people who are discovering cinema. “We can be a factory of moviegoers. “We want to attract generation Z because the best lessons in life are in cinema,” she notes.
Casanovas is convinced that in a movie theater “you can discover countless things and then pull the thread, go further and deepen your learning.” Viewers of the BCN Film Fest can, for example, meet in this edition Maria Montessori, the doctor who developed an effective educational method, through the biopic directed by Léa Todorov and performed by Jasmine Trinca. And also "they will be able to delve deeper into the figure of Sigmund Freud with Matt Brown's film where Anthony Hopkins gets into the shoes of the father of psychoanalysis." Or knowing “who was Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish diplomat who believed in politics as a formula for peace and who was murdered.”
But it is not only dramas and great historical themes that the spectators of the contest must experience. “We have also programmed a lot of comedy,” explains Casanovas, who has seen the 69 titles selected for the different sections of this eighth edition of the Barcelona film festival and “a few more that we have discarded.” Comedies like Disco, Ibiza, Locomía, a film by Kike Maillo, "which has aroused a lot of expectation and which tells the rise and fall of the famous musical group of the 80s and 90s." Or like Simple as Sylvain, a film by Monia Chokri about a good girl who falls in love with the plumber, which won the César for best foreign film. Or like A Difficult Year where Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache “delves into the issue of the environment in their own way.”
And there will be no shortage of films by big stars like Meg Ryan, “a very popular actress, with a very good and transgenerational image, who has reinvented herself as a director with What Happens Next, in which she also stars alongside David Duchovny, with whom she has the “Same chemistry he had with Billy Crystal or Tom Hanks.”
One of France's best-known actors, Vincent Pérez, has also turned to directing, who will present at the BCN Film Fest a swashbuckling film that he wrote with his wife, Karine Silla, Affair of Honor. The film, which tells "how long it took for dueling to be banned in France, is also very feminist, as it tells the story of a woman very ahead of her time, who learned fencing and was one of the first to wear pants, despite to be prohibited by law.”
There will be other films with a female accent such as Caída libre, by Lara Jou, where Belén Rueda plays a controlling and authoritarian woman or L'amour et les forêts, by Valérie Donzalli, in which the protagonist believes she has found the love of her life and She discovers too late that she was very wrong.
For now, yesterday the festival screened We Will Always Have Tomorrow, the great success of Italian cinema of the season. And is not for less. The film, directed and starring Paola Cortellesi, drew great applause. Part of the audience left the room with tears in their eyes at the first screening. The story told in black and white of Delia, a woman living in Rome in 1946 with an abusive husband, shocked the audience. Because Cortellesi recounts her mistreatment with a delicacy that shows everything, but without showing anything, and because Delia accepts the blows because she has no other choice, but she is neither as stupid nor as submissive as her violent husband believes. .
On the opening day of the BCN Film Fest, good cinema shone, but the event also has complementary activities prepared, "because any festival must complement its programming with a good package of alternative activities," says Casanovas. Among these proposals, the presence of film critic Carlos Boyero stands out, who on the afternoon of the 22nd will chat with the public at the Verdi cinemas about his recently published book I don't know if I explain myself (Espasa), where the journalist attacks filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar , against some politicians, especially against Pedro Sánchez and part of his Government, and also recounts his personal experiences in the world of the media or the film festivals he has attended throughout his career.
The Cádiz actress Ruth Gabriel has also published a book. A work that could not be more cinematic. It is titled Women of Cinema (Bad Companies) and delves into the life and work of 30 Spanish actresses who have marked the author's life. Gabriel will also attend the contest, which like every year has a retrospective cycle, this time dedicated to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.
The poster for the eighth edition of the Barcelona festival and the program (the one that Casanovas is taken out of his hands in the streets of Gràcia) is illustrated with the image of Setsuko Hara, Ozu's fetish actress, “a woman of exceptional beauty, "She is the equivalent of Greta Garbo in Japanese cinema, because she retired very young and has remained in the ideology of the public in her country as the image of eternal youth," explains the director.
And he adds that “Ozu's filmography shows a classic family model that contrasts with that of other current films that will also pass through the contest.” Films such as Casa en flames, by Dani de la Orden, which was in charge of kicking off this new edition of the BCN Film Fest yesterday, or Calladita, the debut feature by Miguel Faus. Two films that have a few things in common: young, Catalan directors and the story of the summer vacation of two bourgeois families on the Costa Brava. The first, Casa en flames, in Cadaqués, and the second, Calladita, in Baix Empordà.
The BCN Film Fest has been growing in recent years and plans to become even bigger thanks to good cinema and the public's favor. The contest has 30% public financing and 70% private financing. Now, it has opened negotiations with new administrations such as the Barcelona Provincial Council in search of more income that will allow it to definitively consolidate itself as the great annual showcase of cinema in the Catalan capital. And who knows if one day its red carpet will compete as an equal with that of Cannes or even that of the Oscars.
