- The festival is solidifying its Paraíso section, bringing together the youngest in experimental cinema with a gathering of students and teachers from the Fine Arts faculties of the Universities of Vigo and Salamanca.
- At INPUT, the space for advice on film projects in development that the festival holds together with the Luis Seoane Foundation, the programmers Lur Olaizola, Vanja Milena and Concha Baquero will be tutoring the projects of Sofía Blanco, Rafael Guijarro and Claudia Negro.
The (S8) Mostra Internacional de Cinema Periférico of A Coruña, which will be held between the next 27 May and 5 June in venues such as the Port of A Coruña, Palexco, the Domus and the Luis Seoane Foundation, continues to reveal more content from its programme to the general public.
As its director, Ángel Rueda, confirmed, “the Mostra festival is kicking off a new phase, re-arranging some of its sections and opening up to work by new creators, using cinema as a tool to promote these young generations and turning (S8) into a space for education, reflection and the use of cinema as a transmission channel.”
Along these lines, the organisers are presenting us today with a completely revamped Sinais section, putting the spotlight on filmmakers from the Galician, Spanish and international spheres and paying attention to almost twenty creators who are questioning and breaking free from the parameters of experimental or original avant-garde cinema.
The same is occurring with the Paraíso becoming established as the space focussing on the future of experimental cinema through a gathering of Fine Arts students and teachers. In the last (S8) we were able to count on collaboration from the Fine Arts Faculties of Vigo and Cuenca, and this time we will have a new round of students from the Faculties of Vigo, guided by the filmmaker Xisela Franco, and the University of Salamanca, guided by Laura Gomez Vaquero.
Moreover, (S8) continues to foster film projects in development at INPUT, a space for tutoring and advice held in collaboration with the Luis Seoane Foundation. Here, the projects Film Quilt by Sofía Blanco; Como un buzo muerto en el ojo de Dios (Like a dead diver in the eye of God), by Rafael Guijarro and La peli del disco duro (The hard drive movie), by Claudia Negro will be assessed by the filmmaker, programmer and coordinator of the Tabakalera audiovisual programme (San Sebastián) Lur Olaizola; as well as Vanja Milena Munjin Paiva, from the Valdivia International Film Festival selection committee (Chile) and collaborator in the CineMigrante programming area (Argentina); and Concha Barquero, teacher, member of the Malaga Festival’s selection committee for the documentary section and coordinator of the Malaga Docs meeting.
Furthermore, the Mostra is bolstering its educational department and commitment to creating new audiences in terms of disseminating avant-garde cinematographic creations with screenings organised for more than 300 schoolchildren from schools such as IES Urbano Lugrís, IES Ramón Otero Pedrayo, CEIP Concepción Arenal, CEIP Sanjurjo de Carricarte, IES Ramón Menéndez Pidal and IES Eusebio da Guarda.
Sinais: the visual art of today and the future is here
This, year Sinais is hosting works by new filmmakers from new generations, no longer working with the parameters of the original avant-garde or experimental cinema, but rather questioning and breaking them down.
Aura Vega will be present in this section with her Murmullo (Murmur), bringing together a whole series of other people’s conversations, of transcriptions on the 16 mm film itself, which are transformed into sinuous marks and abstract figures. Untitled Sketch #02 also goes a step further in this game with shapes, generating a concentric collage in Super 8 by the hand of Álvaro Feldman. The artist from Madrid will also be bringing with him Diorama, a self-portrait in the same format, while La Tarara. Corpo d’auga (Body of water), by Claudia Pineda, brings us water as the main element as a point of union and coexistence. Continuing with the sphere of the landscape and an analysis of its elements, our old acquaintance Carla Andrade maps out Galician territory, giving a leading role to this peculiar variety of granite unique to the Serra da Groba range, which gives the piece its title: Amarillo atlántico (Atlantic yellow). Meanwhile, in La bouche, promèner, non, non, non, Acacia Ojea seeks and achieves a dream-like journey along the coast that seems to halt time and give a different residue to the images being contemplated. A Casa do Norte (The House of the North), by the Portuguese Inês Lima, could be thought of as a cinematographic gift in compositional terms. It is an anatomy of the home and of its elements with visual poetry and exquisite sound. Saru Miras, on the other hand, invites us to travel several thousand kilometres with the work A un FPM (At one FPM), a piece in super 8 in which there is an attempt to condense journeys of different kinds through this proposal for structural cinema.
The second block of Sinais hosts works of a more documentary nature, in which aspects such as love and violence are dealt with from different, very unconventional points of view. A cinquito, con derecho a tocar, by NUCBEADE (Quiela Nuc and Andrea Beade), talks about the barraca (fairground stall), grievance, normativity, the normalisation of violence and the construction of one’s gaze. Then, in Descartes (Discards), Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado salvage footage censored in 1980 from the documentary Rocío. The forgotten images of a banned film come to life on the screen after forty years. Jaione Camborda is an expert in finding beauty in minimal, simple things. She returns to Super 8 in this animal Videogram starring two oxen that fill out the shot and triumph with their gestures and their gaze. Transportation Procedures for Lovers is a stroll hand-in-hand upon which Helena Estrela takes us with her into her intimacy.
In the third session in the Sinais programme and also in this section, the Mexican filmmaker Claudio Sodi presents Sight, a kind of vision, a cry, a reflective sigh in 16 mm. Notas sobre la violencia (Notes on violence)is a creation by Martha Valverde: a work in progress about the current relationship between pain and pleasure, about coping with guilt. Sol Mussa returns to (S8) accompanied by Project X, a work in which the Galician takes a step further in her career, this time presenting us with the waste management of Santiago de Compostela. Los apellidos (The surnames) by Tamara Goberna presents itself as a search, a loop, a dream. Maria Pipla works with her family’s cameras. One day, in one of them, she found an underground train trip recorded by mistake, which they later filmed over. That is how Metro came to be, an exceptional coincidence that shows everyday scenes with magic and tenderness. The artist Claudia Negro delights and wounds with her work El otro día soñé que se me caían los dientes (The other day I dreamt my teeth were falling out). This is a totally up-front, generational portrait that addresses life as anguish, enjoyment and a challenge.
Support
The thirteenth (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico is being organised by the eSe8 Association with the backing of institutions such as the Concello da Coruña (town council), the Deputación da Coruña (provincial government), the Xunta de Galicia (autonomous regional government) and the Institute of Cinematography of Audiovisual Arts of the Government of Spain, ICAA, as part of the latter’s Recovery, Transformation and Resilience plan and the Next Generation EU package.
Furthermore, it has been possible to invite Philipp Fleischmann (director of the Schule Friedl Kubelka, Austria) to participate, as well as Angelika Ramlow (project manager of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Germany), Bryan Konefsky (director of Experiments In Cinema, USA), Ute Aurand (producer and programmer specialising in contemporary cinema), Scott Miller Berry (director of Workman Arts, Canada), Ieva Balode (director of Process – Experimental Film Festival, Latvia), Vanja Milena (programmer of the selection committee for the International Film Festival of Valdivia, Chile), Amy Halpern (creator, programmer and teacher at USC, Los Angeles) in this year’s (S8) thanks to the programme of Spanish Cultural Action (AC/E) for the internationalisation of Spanish Culture (PICE). This is being done in its visitor format, which makes it easier for Spanish cultural entities and institutions to have professional international cultural exemplaries in their activities and programmes present in Spain, in order to learn directly and personally about the range of Spanish creativity and culture.
It should be noted that the Mostra has also been able to benefit from the same programme in its mobility format, which intends for foreign cultural entities to have Spanish artists, professionals and creators in their programmes, travelling to Italy to present the programme “The mechanics of light” within the programme of the Nomadica festival.
