THE 20th edition of the PELíCULA-Spanish Film Festival will treat movie buffs from the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia to a selection of contemporary Spanish and Latin American cinema.
PELíCULA 2021 has responded to the pandemic by going online, and even went further by expanding to three other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Presented by the Instituto Cervantes in Manila and Sydney, as well as the Spanish Embassies in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia, the festival will stream 16 feature films and four shorts for free.
It will open on October 1 with El Cover (2021), a musical comedy and debut film of actor Secun de la Rosa. Other films in the line-up are Invisibles (Gracia Querejeta, 2020), Una vez más (Guillermo Rojas, 2020), Tristesse (Ruiz Barrachina, 2020), and the documentaries Oscuro y Lucientes (Samuel Alarcón and Antonio Machado, 2018), and Los días azules (Laura Hojman, 2020). The official entries also include dramas such as 15 horas (Judith Colell, 2020), Ane (David Pérez Sañudo, 2020) and the latest film of David Trueba: A este lado del mundo (2020), a bitter and intelligent depiction of immigration.
Audience Choice Awards
PELíCULA 2021 will also feature Latin American films such as the Mexican documentary Observar las aves (Andrea Martínez Crowther, 2019) and Lina de Lima (2019), a feature film directed by María Paz González and coproduced by Chile, Argentina and Perú. All films will be available with English subtitles and for free via www.pelikula.es for 48 hours.
Similar to previous editions, spectators may vote for their favorite films right after viewing them as the best among the line-up. The Audience Choice Awards has been a very popular tradition since its establishment in 2004, and is kept alive through its transition online. The film with the highest ratings will be screened again on October 10 at 6 p.m., also on the said web site.
To celebrate the 20th edition of the cinematographic showcase, there will be a special selection of films that have won the PELíCULA Audience Choice Award: Fuera de carta (Nacho G. Velilla, 2008), El secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, 2009), También la lluvia (Icíar Bollaín, 2010), Un cuento chino (Sebastián Borensztein, 2011) and Campeones (Javier Fesser, 2018).
Webinars
PELíCULA also will be offering on its web site free webinars and online talks with the directors of the films in the festival and professionals in the audiovisual industry.
On October 4 there will be a roundtable discussion on the possibilities of coproduction of Asian films in Europe and Spanish films in Asia, in which various Spanish, Thai, and Filipino producers and experts on the topic will be participating.
Philippine cinema was born in the Spanish language, which can be deduced from film-related terms in Filipino: pelikula, sine, direktor, aktor, contrabida, and others. They serve as proof of the strong cultural relations shared between Spain and the Philippines. With this in mind, PELíCULA has had activities that served as a space for meeting and interacting with Spanish and Filipino filmmakers since its first editions.
In line with this, the film fest will be holding the webinar “En corto: Short films in the Philippines, Thailand, Australia and Spain” on October 7—an activity which will feature four recent short films, or one per country, and a talk among their directors.
Also, the Department of European Languages of the University of the Philippines (UP)-Diliman is holding a contest on film reviews in Spanish, which is open to students of the Castilian language in the Philippines. For further information, check out https://upddel.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/review-contest-in-spanish-pelikula/.
PELíCULA 2021 is also an initiative of the AECID (Spain’s Agency for International Development Cooperation), in collaboration with ICAA (Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales), the Embassy of Mexico in the Philippines, the National Film Archive of Thailand, the Sydney Film Festival, Australia’s Travelling Film Fest, the Film Development Council of the Philippines, the UP and UP Film Institute, Intramuros Administration, and La Pícara.
All the movies are in Spanish or their original language, with English subtitles. For the schedule, film details and further information, visit www.pelikula.es, or the Facebook page of Instituto Cervantes: www.facebook.com/InstitutoCervantesManila.