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We present our state competition and a retrospective to Roberto Minervini

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We reveal our focus on the work by the Italian filmmaker, who has filmed with great sensibility the Deep South during the last decade, and the seven films of Penínsulas section

Louisiana - The Other Side, Roberto Minervini (2015)

We add to our retrospectives of this 15th edition, which will take place between 29 September andl 7 October, the Italian Roberto Minervini, the director who in the last decade has taken the pulse beat up to the rage of the Deep South in his films. Based in Texas, the filmmaker has recently competed in the Official Section of the Venice Film Festival with What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?. Moreover, we also reveal the seven films that will make up Penínsulas, our Spanish film section.

Roberto Minervini (Fermo, 1970) has won critical applause for his ability to make poetic and hyperrealistic portraits of the marginalized communities in the United States. With previous films such as Louisiana - The Other Side (2015) and Stop the Pounding Heart (2013),  Minervini has competed in Film Festivals such as the Cannes Film Festival and won the David di Donatello Award from the Italian Film Academy. Religious fundamentalism and the problematic issues of drugs and weapons underscore these records of the most conservative America, always filmed with the Galician, Diego Romero Suárez-Llanos as the Director of Photography. In the words of the author: “I wanted to explore the roots of this new indiscriminate political violence that is destroying the country. It was very important for me to hear that rage and I went to its core”.

Festival attendees will be able to see a selection of Minervini's feature films in Santiago de Compostela, with pieces like Low Tide and The Passage, in addition to the ones mentioned above.

According to Pela del Álamo, Director of Curtocircuíto “one of the virtues of Minervini is his ability to work directly with the most crass reality. He is able to connect with the wound of the other person and, from there, build a personal relationship while also building a filmic story. He and Diego Romero are a unique tandem. They penetrate the Texan underworld to extract from them the pain and beauty of the Deep South”.

 

Penínsulas: Cinematographic vanguard around documentaries and ethnography

We also make the films that are a part of Penínsulas public, the section dedicated to the restoration of value to Spanish avant-garde filmmaking. The selection is marked by the presence of new directors but with important tours in the festival circuit, as well as by the exploration of new forms in the fields of documentaries and ethnography. In this last line, one can see in Curtocircuíto films like the recently awarded Those That Desire, by Elena López Riera, in the Locarno Film Festival, centred around the rituals of Pigeon Racing in Vega Baja (Valencia) or Above 592 Meters, in which Maddi Barber portrays the territory transformed by the construction of a dam in the Navarrese Pyrenees. The exploration of the rural reality of the Karrantza Valley (Vizcaya) occupies Wolfdog (Lycisca), by the Catalan, Gerard Ortín, whereas Because of Salt, by Cardozo Basteiro, delves into the cinematographic scenarios of Las Salinas (Almería), a town created for the extraction of salt in which today there are only eight families left. Within an different scope, one can highlight the presence of the winner of the 2018 Goya Award for Best Documentary Short, The Disinherited, in which Laura Ferrés records her father at the time he faced the closure of the family business, a bus company, incorporating elements of fiction into a family portrait. This resource is also used from another angle by Guillermo Benet in The Blameless, the only pure fiction film in the section. In it, they are inspired by an unresolved clue in the documentary Dead City to fictionalize the experience of raptors accused of murdering a policeman after an eviction. The closure locks in with Aliens, by Luis López Carrasco, portrait of Tesa Arranz, singer in the Zombies and fundamental figure of the Madrid scene. In it, she combines the paintings of aliens that Arranz makes with her memories, poems and diaries.