Recent Cinema from Spain Festival

From Oct 20 through 23, 2011.

In honor of this year’s 25th anniversary of Spain’s Goya Awards, EGEDA, the Miami International Film Festival (MIFF), produced and presented by Miami Dade College, and the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts will premiere six of Spain’s most important films of the year, from October 20th through 23rd, in an inaugural Recent Cinema from Spain Festival. Held at the Olympia Theater at the Gusman Center, ticket holders will enjoy nightly red carpet premieres and participate in Q&A sessions with filmmakers and talent following each film.

The Recent Cinema from Spain series will include Black Bread (Pa negre). Winner of nine 2011 Goya Awards, the film chronicles 11-year-old Andreu (Francesc Colomer) and the events that follow after he witnesses two brutal murders. Andreu is sent to live with extended family in the countryside where he befriends his jaded cousin Nuria (Marina Comas), who has lost her fingers due to a grenade explosion, and a imaginative boy who thinks he has angel wings. Loosely based on Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations with the bleak fantastical soul of Pan’s Labyrinth, subversive filmmaker Agustí Villaronga’s harrowing and richly textured depiction of Spanish rural life during wartime is both challenging and rewarding.

Black Bread (Pa negre) was recently short-listed by Spain as one of the three finalists to be the county’s official submission to the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Spain will announce the final selection on September 28th.

“We are excited to showcase the best of contemporary Spanish cinema from a prolific film country that has produced such master artists as Pedro Almodovar, Fernando Trueba and Antonio Banderas, among many others,” said Jaie Laplante, executive director of the Miami International Film Festival. “To be partnering with the Gusman Center, that has hosted these great artists at their Miami International Film Festival debuts, is a special treat, and we look forward to working with EGEDA (Spain’s Audiovisual Producers’ Rights Management Association) to introduce many more great talents to Miami at this inaugural Recent Cinema From Spain festival.”

A Recent Cinema From Spain poster was created in honor of the 25th Anniversary of the Goya Awards, which acknowledges quality in Spanish cinema by rewarding the finest professionals in each technical and creative category of the seventh art. Created in 1987 and organized by the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, the ceremony has unquestionably become the greatest cinema event par excellence of Spain. The pictorial conception of art that Goya had made him the ideal choice to commemorate the greatest stars of Spanish cinema year after year. An infinity of famous names have several of the statuettes adorning their shelves: such a as Pedro Almodóvar, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Alejandro Amenábar, Javier Aguirresarobe and Alberto Iglesias.

Recent Cinema from Spain Festival
http://www.miami.recentcinemafromspain.com