Festival Presentation

 

Making a film festival strong is no easy task.We always say that the Granada Film Festival Cines del Sur is still too young to feel solid, although the figures give us plenty of reasons to hope that  his event will become a permanent event on the city’s calendar and  ill be among the most important international festivals. Audience ttendance, programming, budget allocations, special guests... with every new edition the cycle begins again, and every year the challenges are different. This is the year of the crisis, the year that we, like the rest of society, must adjust to the delicate

circumstances surrounding us. But we are aware, precisely because we are dedicated to areas where hardship is often endemic, where the tragedies are of greater magnitude and affect the life and basic rights of human beings, that there are no real reasons for us to be discouraged, but rather quite the contrary.

Cines del Sur has programmed for viewers a new series of recommendations that discover new talents and revisit some of the more established directors. And this in an especially productive year in which the programming committee has had to work harder than ever before to decide which films will be shown in Granada.

Competing in the Official Section are ten films from Asia, Africa and Latin America, all of which will have their Spanish premiere at the Festival; the informative section Itineraries includes most of the best films from this harvest; in the Mediterráneos section works of tremendous quality from countries located on the shores of the Mediterranean will compete with one another.

This year the retrospective is devoted to the last 40 years of Filipino film. The series is a true gem and has never before been seen in this country. It brings together twenty films that have shaped at least two generations of filmmakers who have surprised the film world with the quality and freshness of their work.

The new series More Human Factor, discussions at colloquia and roundtables, exhibitions, the extension of the Festival to the province, the meeting of the main festivals of this type from around the world…Cines del Sur returns with more energy than ever, hoping to quench the public’s thirst for good cinema and to share in the hope that better times are right around the corner.

 

 

José Sánchez-Montes

Director - Festival de Granada Cines del Sur

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a time, back in the fifties, when the West discovered cinema from the East. Such cinema, obviously, had been around for some time, but it had rarely reached our screens and we knew almost nothing about it. We then discovered the work of its great masters, the main lines of strength of its production, its most frequent genres and subgenres... With time, oriental film even became a favoured topic of theoretical attention and academic work. The voyage is far from over, although the geopolitical South soon began to take on clear protagonism in specialized journals and festivals all over the world. In the age of the new cinemas (with Latin America being at the head) and the emergence of young filmmakers in the most remote corners of the planet (mostly, but not exclusively, sub-Saharan Africa), this South was demanding the attention it had never before received and the international circuit of festivals finally seemed willing to comply.

The Granada Festival Cines del Sur now joins that circuit, and it does so with the intention not of making untimely discoveries but rather of contributing to the public's knowledge about a subject the wealth and diversity of which have been amply demonstrated. Far from falling into that monolithic stereotype which, from comfortable ignorance, some people attribute to them, cinemas from the South offer images as varied as they are vibrant, and which our Festival now intends to make available to the public, for the enjoyment of viewers. Fiction and documentary -as well as any middle ground or hybrid formula-, commercial productions and films of the auteur tradition, celluloid and digital... all quality films produced in the South will find a place within the design of the Granada Festival. The idea is to add, not take away. The idea behind the Festival is to provide a ductile container which, through its various sections, including some essential historical retrospectives, does justice to a flank of world production whose value is not always acknowledged. "What is important now," said the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray a quarter of a century ago, "is not so much that in the West they understand our films but simply that they see them."

We're working on it.

Alberto Elena
Programme Director - Cines del Sur