Oct. 31, 2012 - Issue #889-Human Trafficking Problem
Films from afar
Festival of New Spanish Cinema brings forward a caravan of cinematic treasures
» Madrid, 1987
VUE WEEKLY: Tell me about the festival's beginnings.
MARTA SANCHEZ: I founded a company called Pragda. What we do is promote Spanish films abroad; we work a lot in the United States, and we wanted to create an event that brings in new films every year. So we create a loyal audience that's eager to find out what happened that year in filmmaking in Spain. We started in five cities, and now we are in 10 cities in all of the United States and Canada. The idea is to have a presence, every year, of Spanish films. Because it's not so easy to get into [North American] movie screens usually.
VW: Typically, film festivals tend to stay and grow in one city. What inspired having this one tour around?
MS: The idea was that we wanted to reach out to those areas that are film oriented. The presence of the Spanish film is very limited ... we'd prefer to be in more cities for a shorter period of time. We'd prefer to be in different cities, so different audiences can enjoy the films, and maybe be a little bit smaller, be in one screen or one movie theatre—though the movie theatre should be very good. [laugh] That's our philosophy.
VW: How do you select the films?
MS: It's actually very difficult. You are kind of a gatekeeper: whatever you decide is what people are going to think Spanish filmmaking is, so there is a lot of responsibility in that. But we're very interested in diversity, to show films that are very different between them[selves], the filmmakers [that] have a different way of approaching filmmaking and stories, different stories in general. We want to bring opportunity to everybody to enjoy very well known filmmakers as well as beginners. That's important for us. The common thing among all of them is the quality: you will never find a film that is there just because, y'know, we have a slot more. It's the quality: some years you see 10 films, other years you see six films, this year we see five films in Edmonton. But those are very well curated.
Fri, Nov 2 – Mon, Nov 12, 2012
Festival of New Spanish Cinema
Metro Cinema at the Garneau
Privacy Policy:
Vue respects your privacy. We will not forward your personal information to any other organization except as required by law, and will use your e-mail address only to respond to your comments. We reserve the right to edit and remove comments for length, clarity and/or if they are illegal or inappropriate. Your email address is never shown to visitors to vueweekly.com. Read the whole policy at: http://vueweekly.com/privacy
Comments policy
Comments go online directly without first being seen or reviewed by editors at Vue. Don't personally attack people, don't be defamatory, don't be spam-atory, don't hawk your band, don't pretend to be someone else, be clear, be on topic, be nice. Read our extended comments policy here. »
We use Disqus for our comments system. What's that all about?
We found that managing the comment community at Vue was easier to do with a system like Disqus. If this isn't straightforward to you, get help here.