The Seville European Film Festival reaches its halfway point supported by an audience that has packed the theaters and sold out tickets over the weekend. Today, the focus is on the proposals with an Andalusian accent: They were the days, Amanece and Caleta Palace. Revolution and Tragedy in the City of Paradise debut in the Seville capital. The first of them, the debut feature by Sevillian director Bernabé Bulnes, captures all the attention and is responsible for giving way to the celebration of the Canal Sur Radio and Television Gala.
The event, which takes place within the framework of the Festival based on a collaboration agreement between both entities, will recognize actress Mari Paz Sayago with the Canal Sur Lifetime Achievement Award, who has gained popularity thanks to directors such as Paco León. and that with his work he has achieved the respect of critics and the affection of the public. This festival of the seventh art takes place at the Cervantes Cinema, one of the nerve centers of this twentieth edition that celebrates 150 years since it opened its doors to the public.
It Was the Days is a feature film by Bernabé Bulnes that tells the story of an actress and a director who lived an intense story in the past and who, precisely, meet again at the Sevillian European Film Festival. Adela Castaño, Silvia Acosta and Gregor Acuña-Pohl are the ones who embody this production, one of the 19 films that are part of the Panorama Andaluz section of this 20th edition of the Seville European Film Festival.
Alma, an actress who works as a waitress, receives the proposal to audition for the next film by Gabino Robles, a director with whom she had an intense relationship seven years ago. During the days of the Seville European Film Festival, former lovers will meet again and seek answers to difficult questions. The situation will become more complicated when, a few days later, Ingrid Cuesta, Gabino's partner and leading actress in his latest films, arrives in the city.
Javier Macipe has presented at the Seville Festival his film about the journey of the leader of Más birras in the nineties through Argentina to reconcile with his vocation, The Blue Star, and has assured that it is not a biopic.
The film is a very personal follow-up of the figure of the late Zaragoza musician Mauricio Aznar on his journey through Argentina to rediscover his vocation. The singer and guitarist was the leader of the group Más Birras and author of one of the most covered songs in the history of Spanish rock, Apuesta por el Rock and Roll. He died almost anonymously, tragically, like a kind of Spanish Sugar Man.
“The film is planned in such a way that it interests you regardless of whether you knew Mauricio or whether he had not even existed,” the new director argued at the press conference. To this argument he has added the fact that the film does not have the structure of a biographical film, but rather a travel film, and that it stars a musician who renounced success, "it is about anonymous artists who, having talent, give up having an impact."
During the nineties, the famous Spanish rocker traveled to Latin America to try to overcome a vocational crisis and a relapse into his addictions. His initial objective was to visit the house of Atahualpa Yupanqui, but finally he ended up in Santiago del Estero, where he met the farmer's father, Carlos Carabajal.
Despite being the author of some of the most famous songs in his country's folklore, the old man could barely pay his bills. During his stay in the Argentine city, the veteran musician welcomed Spanish rockabilly with great generosity, acting as musical maestro Miyagi. From their meeting an extravagant quixotic duo was born, with all the signs of being an absolute commercial failure.
The film has won the audience award at the Mérida Unpublished Film Festival and the Youth and Spanish Cooperation Awards in San Sebastián. Pepe Lorente gives life to the protagonist and real members of the Carabajal family to the Argentine clan.
"They are the Flores from Argentina. If actors had played them it would have been like putting someone in Spain to play Lolita. They all lived it very easily and the interpretation was based on building a real relationship with Pepe," explained the filmmaker .
The complicity and involvement of Lorente in his role has been such that Macipe has announced that they plan to do a concert tour with the band that was formed for the film.
There is a moment in the filming when convention is broken and the audience is shown the interiors of the filming. Macipe's intention was to share the experience that the team and himself have lived through their own journey of documentation and filming.
“It is not a formal artifice, but a way of being more honest and feeling that we have more right to tell this story,” concludes the director, who in this feature film has achieved two personal milestones, paying tribute to one of the musicians of his youth and being congratulated by another: Enrique Bunbury not only makes an audio cameo in La Estrella Azul, but he sat down with Macipe to watch it.
Among the films and documentaries presented within Panorama Andaluz, Sembrando Sueños has been especially valued, whose director, Alfonso Sánchez, has successfully carried out a theatrical tour to pay tribute to the playwright brothers Álvarez Quintero, two “geniuses” who “were reviled” for be analyzed from a perspective more in line with our present, without prejudices and without labels. This is what Agus Jiménez, producer of the work directed by Alfonso Sánchez (Luz Award in 2017) and which featured performances by Alberto López, Carmen Canivell and Antonia Gómez, as well as the participation of Santiago Segura and Arturo Pérez, speaks to La Vanguardia. Reverse among others.
“There was no audiovisual” that addressed the work and life of these writers, “their representations had been relegated to amateur” and now, with this work we “rediscover” the authors, known mainly for their comic texts. With this, the aim is to eradicate prejudices and highlight the Andalusian art of people who achieved great success with their more than 200 plays and whose texts inspired fifty films.
The film was screened this Saturday at the Cine Cervantes, the same place where the brothers premiered their first work, when they were just 17 years old, then known as "Teatro Cervantes." Its screening in Seville coincides with the end of the events that have taken place since 2021 for the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Álvarez Quintero Brothers, this Tuesday it can be seen in Utrera, the hometown of those honored.
Alfonso Sánchez is an Andalusian filmmaker who has developed his career from Andalusia as an actor, director, screenwriter and producer of film, television and theater. His career as a director has been linked to his production company Mundoficción Producciones, from which he began directing successful short films and receiving awards at national and international festivals. The most commercial success came with the distribution on YouTube of the 'Sevillana Trilogy', three short films where the characters of 'El Culebra y El Cabeza' and 'Los Compadres' were made known. Derived from these characters came more ambitious projects such as his first film 'The World is Ours' (2012), which was followed by 'The World is Yours' (2018) or 'The World is Yours' (2021).
He has also developed work in the performing arts as a producer, director and actor with the play 'Patente de Corso', a theatrical adaptation based on the journalistic texts of the writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 'Compadres para siempre', 'Cosas de niños', 'Somos carajotes' and 'Homenaje a los Álvarez Quintero', currently on tour.
As an actor he has a long career in television series, such as 'Allí Abajo', and feature films such as 'Grupo 7' or the successful 'Ocho surnames vascos'. In 2018 he broadcast the first season of 'Gigantes' for Movistar Plus, of which he is executive producer.
In 2020 he releases two fiction feature films, 'Para todo la muerte' and 'SuperAgente Makey'. In 2022 she has released the comedy 'The world is yours'.
La Espera, a film by F. Javier Gutiérrez, is a thriller with a fantastic component that is programmed in Panorama Andaluz. In his feature film you can sense the taste for folk horror from films like The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) “adapted to our traditions, superstitions and fears, with a hyperrealistic approach where smell and touch are perceived,” he commented. the director at his press conference at SEFF.
The film is a powerful film about good and evil, punishment, pain and guilt. The story follows Eladio (Víctor Clavijo in a masterful work), the guardian of a farm who falls into the temptation of accepting a bribe from a hunter. What initially seemed like a positive turn in his life will soon transform into a macabre descent into hell where Eladio must fight for his sanity in an intense plot that challenges his morals and his principles.
“The film has a layer of folk horror, easier for an audience to digest; then there is a social commentary, focused on the way in which, in the seventies, servitude could be dispensed with; and then it has a human layer, with its analysis of the miseries, darkness, crudeness, fragility and beauty of people,” the director has distinguished. After winning the 2008 Malaga Festival with his debut feature 3 Días and directing Hollywood Rings (2017), the Córdoban filmmaker felt the need to film something with greater creative freedom. “The logical step was to return here, to focus on a plot from a personal point of view, within the Andalusian mountains, with western DNA. “I wanted to convey the feelings of guilt in a very personal context, to return to the roots, to the aridity and to childhood memories,” the director declared at a press conference.
This search for autonomy has had a negative and a positive aspect. Not having public aid has implied precariousness, which has materialized in restrictions on locations and conditions marked by time. “We had to shoot it in four weeks, when to do it with precision and perfection, it would have needed eight,” specified Gutiérrez, who immediately highlighted how favorable it was that he did not have to answer to anyone. “The films you make with studios are to please, while this one has an almost philosophical charge. Waiting could not exist if it were not independent.” Gutiérrez believes that 'The Wait' would not have been possible without the creative freedom that an independent production gives.
In the film, Víctor Clavijo plays a guard of a farm in Andalusia in the seventies who accepts a bribe from a hunter. Weeks later, his entire life collapses. What seemed like a favorable turn of fate turns into a macabre descent into hell in which his sanity is tested. For the actor, the offer of this role was a surprise. “Physically, due to my origin and my education, I give an urban profile. I had been to the countryside twice in my life,” Clavijo joked.
The director suggested that he lose weight, grow his hair and nails long. The interpreter spent a few days on a farm to understand the daily life of a guard, not only in terms of day-to-day work, but also the feeling of loneliness.
“Later I put the guilt, the desire to die, the pain of the loss on the grill. I lived every day with the feeling of the bullfighter who goes out to the bullring to die. There were going to be four weeks of filming and then I could get rid of the negative energy of this character,” explained the artist, recognized with the Best Actor Award at the Screamfest Horror Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Hugo Ruiz's debut feature, Una noche con Adela, also programmed in Panorama Andaluz, does not mask that fury, and hence it drifts towards genre and not comedy. The director valued the role that genre cinema plays in conveying important social issues. “When you touch on a transcendent topic through terror, it gives the impression that it is not serious, but it is a fantastic way to approach it because human beings are attracted to fear,” he declared during his press conference at the festival, where he was accompanied by the producers JJ Montero, Kike Sánchez and Hugo Serra and the actors Paco Martínez, Rosalía Omil and Beatriz Morandeira.
The director chose to film this revenge story in sequence "because he wanted the viewer to spend every second with the protagonist so that at the end of the film they would know Adela better and understand what she has gone through." Laura Galán, recognized with the Goya for best new actress for Cerdita, is the absolute protagonist of this story that portrays a slow-cooked punishment for a traumatized woman in her adolescence. With these two roles, the actress is carving out the title of muse of horror cinema in Spain. Ruiz acknowledged in this regard that in the United States she was labeled the new scream queen. However, the director considers her a multifaceted actress, “whom we are going to see do very different things equally well.”
