CURTOCIRCUÍTO 2014

06 October 2014 - 11 October 2014

Curtocircuíto 2014, the eleventh edition of this indispensable event for cinema lovers in our city and in the whole of Galicia, is here. After a year of transition due to a change in the art direction, the festival has been scheduled to take place on its original dates in October again, with a view to consolidating this schedule in the following editions.


A round table with Luis Miñarro, Felipe Lage and Neus Ballús
Auteur cinema: production models
Wednesday 8 October. 11:30-14 h
Admission is free, subject to capacity. Register

The financial crisis, the democratisation of audiovisual technology or the development of IT networks are some of the factors that have led to a change of paradigm. New narratives entail new production models, causing a redefinition of professional profiles, including that of the producer. He or she is not only a businessperson now, but also plays a critical role in the creative process.
This round table will include three outstanding producers who, sharing an interest in a daring type of cinema, have developed different structures in their jobs, all of which are as successful as fragile. Unconventional models applied to both international co-production and self-production, and based on their passion for and commitment to cinema.

Luis Miñarro

is the manager of Eddie Saeta, an audiovisual production company that, since its beginning in 1989, has produced different titles that have always been featured and applauded at international festivals, and share a common interest in auteur cinema. Right from the start, Luis Miñarro opted to support young directors with their own outlook on cinema. Isabel Coixet’s Cosas que nunca te dije (1996) participated in the Panorama section of the Berlin Festival. Later, Marc Recha’s Les mans buides (2003) was screened within the section Un Certain Regard of the Cannes Festival, and then José Luis Guerín’s En la ciudad de Sylvia (2007) competed in the official section of the Venice Festival and won the Bisato d’Oro critics award.

Felipe Lage
. Manager of Zeitun Films, a production company he founded together with Oliver Laxe and Martin Pawley. Felipe Lage has been involved in the production of four films to date: Todos vós sodes capitáns (Oliver Laxe, 2010), Arraianos (Eloy Enciso, 2012), O quinto evanxeo de Gaspar Hauser (Alberto Gracia, 2013) and Costa da Morte (Lois Patiño, 2013), all of which have received awards at some of the most important film festivals (Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam, BAFICI, FICUNAM or Jeonju). He is currently working on the production of new projects by Oliver Laxe (As mimosas), Rainer Kirberg (A ausencia) and Lois Patiño (Tempo vertical).

Neus Ballús. A film director and screenwriter. Her first feature-length film, La plaga (2013), was premiered internationally at the 63rd edition of the Berlinale, won four 2013 Gaudí awards and was nominated for the 2013 Lux Awards and the European Film Awards; it was also nominated for one Goya award. The film portrays everyday life in Gallecs, a rural area of Vallès Oriental, in the periphery of Barcelona, by following the relationships of five characters living there. A graduate in Audiovisual Communication, with an MA in Creative Documentary Filmmaking from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ballús has also shot the short films La Gabi (2004) and L’avi de la càmera (2005), as well as the documentary Immersió (2009), shot under the water of a public pool, which received the award to the best documentary in the ALCINE Festival.


A master class with Mike Hoolboom
Why Can’t the Tail Pass Through?
Friday 10 October. 17-18 h
Admission is free, subject to capacity. Register
Mike Hoolboom will offer a master class based on the classic Zen riddle ‘Why can’t the tail pass through?’ In a combination of lecture + screening, the artist will talk about process-oriented cinema, filmmaking as a practice, methods of not-knowing, and the centrality of research.

Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made over fifty films and videos, though most have been withdrawn from circulation; approximately a dozen remain on view. His work has appeared in over four hundred festivals, garnering thirty awards. He has been granted the Tom Berner Award for community service and two lifetime achievement awards, the first from the city of Toronto, and the second from the Mediawave Festival in Hungary. He has enjoyed retrospectives of his work at the Images Festival (Toronto), Visions du Réel (Switzerland), Cork International Festival (Ireland), Cinema De Balie (Amsterdam), Mediawave Festival (Hungary), Impakt Festival (Holland) or Jihlava Documentary Festival (Czech Republic), among others. He is also a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and as the experimental film co-ordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.



A seminar with Luis E. Parés included in the Márgenes Lectures on Cinema series
The anatomy of influence: A new reading of the tradition of Spanish experimental cinema (2)
Friday 10 October. 11-14 h
Admission is free, subject to capacity. Register
The past years have seen the emergence in Spain of a sort of innovative cinema, one that searches for new forms of expression and takes a daring stance in terms of both content and language; a different cinema that is distributed differently – at specialised festivals or directly on the Internet, omitting commercial venues. What has been called ‘another Spanish cinema’ is becoming prominent, reaching even the specialist and the popular press. Many of these directors are aware that they belong to a specific tradition in Spanish cinema: independent cinema. This entails a defence of more peripheral films that has led to the emergence of many unknown directors who have influenced new generations. This seminar intends to show the existence of that experimental cinema tradition and also take this opportunity to present another possible history of Spanish cinema, one that is more daring that the one that has been told so far.

Luis E. Parés is a historian and a documentary maker. He studied Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad Complutense and took an MA in Creative Documentary Filmmaking at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. As a researcher, he has published the book Notes sur l’émigration – Apunts per a una pel•lícula invisible (Sala d’Art Jove of the Government of Catalonia, 2011), for which he obtained a research grant from the Catalonian Department of Youth, and Filmar el exilio desde Francia (Instituto Cervantes, 2012), resulting from the research Filmar el exilio, for which he received a research grant from the Catalonian National Council for Culture and Arts (CoNCA). He is currently preparing his PhD on the same topic at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He acted as programmer in the Amalgama emerging and experimental cinema sessions, in different festivals such as ZINEBI (Bilbao), CineEurope (Barcelona) and Punto de Vista (Pamplona), and for institutions such as Hamaca (Barcelona) and Instituto Cervantes. At present, he collaborates with the Filmoteca Española (Spanish Film Archive), manages Espacio Márgenes (margenes.org) and writes in Caimán. Cuadernos de Cine.



A Blank Paper collective workshop with Óscar Monzón and Lois Patiño
In their own image
Tuesday 7, Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 October. 11-14 and 18-20 h
The festival should serve as a breeding ground for new ideas, as a nucleus of creation. This is why we have decided to bring six filmmakers and six documentary photographers together in this workshop conducted by Escuela Blank Paper.
The difference between a photograph and a shot is only one (an essential one) – time. Reflecting upon the idea of time; first, from a metalinguistic perspective, i.e., how cinema represents time and what mechanisms photography uses; and, second, from a more philosophical stand. What is time? Can it be represented? To what extent is it just an idea, there being no actual time but a mixture of different ways of perceiving it? In sum: thinking, researching and showing through images that there are different times depending on the space where we decide to work and the way in which an author perceives time.
On the basis of those ideas, the photographer Óscar Monzón and the filmmaker Lois Patiño will guide six photographers and six filmmakers, whose work is close to the documentary genre, through a dialogue that will explore the different approaches to reality used, respectively, by each group of them.
Here, we put forward the idea of the documentary genre as being a reality-based fiction genre. Therefore, the mission of a documentary filmmaker or photographer will not be to show or unveil a specific reality, but to disclose to the public a new, single way of seeing things, and thus sensitise the public to other spectra of visual reality. The participants will analyse, then, what mechanisms of language they use to build their outlooks.
In this theoretical and practical workshop, the teachers and the participants will explore these ideas in depth by analysing other authors’ work, as well as their own, challenging the capacities of photographic and filmic means to represent reality.

Óscar Monzón was born in Malaga in 1981 and currently lives and works in Madrid. He has been a member of the Blank Paper collective since its formation in 2003. He has received a plastic arts and photography grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture for the Colegio de España in Paris, a grant from Fundación Temas de Arte, the Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation First Book Award 2013, and a GD4PhotoArt grant from Fondazione Isabella Seràgnoli, in Bologna. He has exhibited his work in the Carmen de la Guerra, Conde Duque and Antigua Tabacalera galleries, Madrid; in Le Bal and RVB Books, Paris; and in Galeria Olido, São Paulo. At present, he is also showing his work in the Fernán Gómez centre, as part of the PHE14 festival.

Lois Patiño
. He took a degree in psychology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and simultaneously did cinema studies at Escuela Tai. He pursued his cinema training at the NYFA and in Barcelona, where he did an MA in Creative Documentary Filmmaking at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His videos and video installations have been shown in art centres such as Casa Encendida (Madrid), CCCB (Barcelona), MARCO (Vigo), Centro Cultural San Martín (Buenos Aires) and Galería Solar (Portugal). His films have been screened at film festivals such as Locarno, Rotterdam, San Francisco FF, Ann Arbour, Roma, Cinema du Réel, Vila do Conde, Media City, Jihlava, Viennale, Punto de Vista … and the Rencontres Internationales, which took place in Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid). His Montaña en sombra won awards at the Oberhausen Festival (Germany) and at Clermont-Ferrand (France), among others. In 2013, at the Locarno Festival, he received the Award to the Best Emerging Director with his feature-length film Costa da Morte.



A talk with the directors attending the festival, professionals and interested audiences
CREA Sessions
Tuesday 7, Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 October. 16:30-18 h
The CREA Sessions are an informal meeting point. In each session, we will propose a topic of common interest for the festival guests, the directors of the shorts, CREA members and the audience. The aim is to exchange experiences and ideas for the future. In spite of the relaxed atmosphere of the CREA Sessions, Curtocircuíto is making through them an important bid to share ideas, generate cooperation, disseminate our network and create other possible synergies. Admission to these activities is free (no registration is required).

More info: www.curtocircuito.org