If there is a European festival in which Spanish cinema is welcome, it must be the Berlinale.
The history of the German competition is marked by names like Pedro Almodóvar, who won the first Teddy, the award that rewards queer
cinema
, with
The Law of Desire
and then presented
Átame
in competition.
Alejandro Amenábar and Isabel Coixet coincided in the 1996 edition with
Tesis
and
Things I Never Told You
.
Ventura Pons was invited for five years in a row with his films.
And, in recent years, names such as Carla Simón, Pilar Palomero, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa and Estibaliz Urresola emerged from the festival, driving a generational and gender change in Spanish cinema.
The first, applauded with
Estiu 1993
in Berlin as an unknown, won the Golden Bear for
Alcarràs
in 2022.
In this edition, Spanish cinema is conspicuous by its absence in the competition for the Golden Bear, but it is widely represented in the parallel sections.
They include the directors of six Spanish-produced films: Macu Machín (
La Hojarasca
), Anna Cornudella (
The Human Hibernation
), Lucía G. Romero (the short
Cura sana
), Klaudia Reynicke (
Queens
, co-production with Peru), Ingrid Pokropek (
The major tones
, co-production with Argentina) and Antonella Sudasassi Furniss (
Memories of a burning body
, co-production with Costa Rica).
They are all women, but the counterpoint is found in the guardian figure of Carlos Saura: the section dedicated to classic cinema screens the restored version of
Deprisa, deprisa
, the director's foray into quinqui cinema, with which he won the Golden Bear in 1981.
The protagonist sisters of 'La Hojarasca', by Macu Machín, presented in the parallel Forum section.
Met by EL PAÍS in a hotel in the center of the German capital, the six exchanged impressions about this festival “so warm in a city so cold,” as Macu Machín claimed, which sold out all the tickets in its two screenings at the festival.
The Canarian director, 48 years old, has presented in Forum, a prestigious section of the festival dedicated to the most daring or experimental cinema, her portrait of three sisters who are fighting for an inheritance that is more symbolic than material, a piece of land with some almond trees near the volcano of La Palm.
“It is a story that I have experienced in my own family,” says Machín.
Located between documentary and fiction, it stars the director's mother and two aunts, architects of an “involuntary matriarchy.”
The three play themselves in
La Hojarasca
, a naturalistic and poetic debut with a cinematographic sensibility more typical of other latitudes.
“I feel very close to the new Galician cinema.
I have always felt a very Galician energy in La Palma,” acknowledges Machín.
Reinas
, by the Peruvian Klaudia Reynicke, also talks about a family and mixes what has been experienced and what has been told.
The protagonists of it are a mother and two daughters who rush to emigrate to the United States to escape the chaos of Lima in 1992, as told in the news program that opens the film.
They only need the permission of an absent parent.
“I wanted to return to the Peru that I left as a child and rebuild my relationship with the country from the present.
“It’s a movie about leaving and then coming back,” says Reynicke, 48, who previously premiered the film at Sundance.
In Berlin she has done it in Generation, a section dedicated to children and adolescents, from which names like Simón and Palomero have emerged in recent years.
“For certain films, it is better to be in a small section than in the competition.
Sometimes you connect better with the public from less exposed places.”
Abril Gjurinovic and Luana Vega in 'Queens', by Klaudia Reynicke.
Ingrid Pokropek, 30, participates in the same section with
Los tones majors
.
Again, her film starts from the biographical, but she passes it through the sieve of fiction.
A girl with a metal plate in her arm after an accident begins to receive a message in Morse code through her prosthesis, the beginning of a Buenos Aires story that alternates adventure with melancholy, which the director filmed in the house of the her parents.
“I wanted to introduce fantasy into the credible world of the film, mix it with the autobiographical and the familiar,” said the person responsible for it, who uses the precariousness of her country to define the uncertain life of her characters. .
Carla Simón, Pilar Palomero, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa and Estibaliz Urresola have emerged from Berlin, names that have ensured a generational and gender change in Spanish cinema
Antonella Sudassi Furness was already in Berlin in 2019 with
The Wake of the Ants.
In this edition she returns with
Memories of a Burning Body
, which has been screened in the parallel Panorama section.
“I took it as an acknowledgment of perseverance,” says the 38-year-old Costa Rican, while she takes invitations to the movie premiere for her colleagues from her bag.
The film questions three women in their 70s about how they experienced her sexuality despite growing up in a time when it was taboo to express it openly, and then recreates her memories through film reinterpretations.
“I had with them the conversation that I would have liked to have with my grandmothers, but I couldn't,” explains the director (one was sick and the other died).
She decided to look for three women to understand “what they experienced so that we can live the way we live,” as if behind a false family in the absence of the biological one.
His film has aroused interest in the festival market, the second most important in Europe after Cannes, where the rights to release films are sold and bought and financing for future projects is closed, along with titles such as the new one by Amenábar (with Miguel de Cervantes as the protagonist), Icíar Bollaín (
Nevenka
) or the return of Alberto Rodríguez, among other projects.
In total, some 40 Spanish production companies and distributors participate in the event, a number that has increased compared to recent editions.
An image from 'The Human Hibernation', by Anna Cornudella.
Catalan Anna Cornudella, 33, never believed that her film would be released in a cinema.
“It is a project that is based on artistic research, which has almost no dialogues, and I had not even shot a short film.
It's a miracle that it's here,” she says about
The Human Hibernation
, also premiered at Forum, “the perfect destination” for an unclassifiable film.
She describes a human society that hibernates like animals, as if it were a fictitious civilization or perhaps a hypothesis of the future, what awaits our species if it manages to survive the climate crisis.
A boy wakes up earlier than he should and succumbs in the snow, while his sister tries to understand what has happened.
“I wanted to reflect on how we understand nature and the animal condition, as if we were not part of them,” says Cornudella.
The last on the list is the youngest, Lucía G. Romero, the 25-year-old daughter of a Catalan and a Cuban.
Her short film is her final project at the ESCAC in Barcelona.
“She had never projected anything outside the academic framework,” admits Romero, who has released
Cura sana
in the section dedicated to young audiences, like Simón and Palomero, two references before.
His project, which announces a very welcome voice in the monochrome landscape of Spanish cinema, starts from a situation of family abuse and material scarcity to reflect on issues as profound as the trace left by violence, double cultural identity or sexual difference.
Roser Rendon Ena, protagonist of the short film 'Cura sana', by Lucía G. Romero.
“Like the protagonist, I have grown up in no man's land.
Spain is a very white country and, despite being from Barcelona, I cannot feel fully European because of my physique.
In Cuba, on the other hand, I will always be the Spanish one,” says Romero.
Despite the harshness from which his story is born, it is still a simple story of lesbian desire during the San Juan festival.
“I have never experienced what it is like to fall in love with a man, so I was not going to represent it.
“I wanted to describe something that was close to me.”
Mission accomplished.
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