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“Galicia in Focus” at the 31st European Film Fest Palić

26.06.2024.

At this year’s European Film Festival Palić, which will take place in Palić and Subotica from July 20 to 26, the traditional focus program will be centered around the Spanish region Galicia. This selection will showcase three feature films and twelve shorts selected by Victor Paz Morandeira, a film critic and programmer from Spain.

In the feature films part of the program, the audience will be able to see “The Rye Horn”, a movie by Jaione Camborda in which the protagonist, Maria, is forced to hide from the authorities and flee the country after helping a young woman in trouble in Francoist Spain;  “The Rim” by Alberto Gracia, which starts with Damián participating in a TV game show in which loyalty wins; and “Matria” by Alvaro Gago, that follows Ramona, a woman living a life filled with struggle and sacrifice in a small Galician fishing village.

The selector Victor Paz Morandeira has said the following about the selection of feature films: “Many filmmakers have chosen to work abroad in recent years and their films are excellent, although for this programme we have decided to focus on Galicia. That is, the stories presented here take place in our land and are mostly spoken in our language”.

Regarding the shorts selection he added: “Three recent feature-length films coexist with a large selection of short films from the last 3-4 years. While the former are fictions, the latter delve into animation, documentary or experimental cinema, fields in which Galicia has an interesting array of filmmakers.

The film program at the Palić Festival will be accompanied by Carla Andrade’s workshop, “Arthouse celluloid cinematography”, devoted to making and editing films shot with 8mm cameras, the popular “super eights”.

Galicia is a region in the northwest of Spain, just above Portugal, a country with which it shares historical and linguistic ties. Its cinema, without great resources and with a few exceptions, never stood out for its artistic mastery or its industrial muscle. 2010 came to change this panorama. That year, Óliver Laxe premiered his debut film You All Are Captains at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes in Cannes. Made with as little money as enormous inventiveness, the film ended up winning the FIPRESCI prize. Laxe was only 28 years old at the time.

This event marked the explosion of what came to be known as the New Galician Cinema, a generation of young directors who, with modern cinema as their guide and a great desire to innovate in terms of form, eventually gave birth to a series of films that invaded the most prestigious international festivals. This was repeated at Cannes and others such as Berlinale, Locarno, Sundance and Rotterdam followed. Laxe was was joined by names such as Eloy Enciso, Lois Patiño, Ángel Santos, Xacio Baño, Alberto Gracia, Carla Andrade and Jaione Camborda. Some of these filmmakers have works in this strand.

At the same time, perhaps in response to this spectacular irruption, the more industrial cinema became more alert and professionalised. Several directors emerged who, while choosing a more narrative cinema, did not renounce to leaving their authorial stamp in very well-executed films - Álvaro Gago is the most outstanding among them. Another noteworthy element is the use of the regional language, Galician, in many of these works. Formerly marginalised as the popular language compared to Spanish, which is considered more cultured, these films are helping to break this stigma for the Galician language.

The selection "In focus: Galicia" is supported by the Galician Agency for Cultural Industries (AGADIC) and the Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA).

The Palić European Film Festival has been supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, the Provincial Secretariat for Culture, Public Information and Relations with Religious Communities, the City of Subotica, the European Union through the Creative Europe MEDIA program, as well as numerous friends and media partners.

Gorky List has been a sponsor and supporter of the Palić European Film Festival for more than 20 years, both as an indispensable part of our artistic scenography and a partner that encourages the audience to delve into the experiences of the showcased films through the Gorky List Audience Award.