LOVE IN THE CLASSROOM

Every summer, the film schools and universities throw to the market hundreds of young people eager to become filmmakers, or at least, professionals of this bad call: industry.

For the last year I have been teaching for a few hours a week in a film course and it is recurrent to debate with them about their future. Inwardly what I ask myself is what their training should consist of as creators of a free, authentic and also competitive cinema. For such answers there are no manuals, shortcuts, or mathematical formulas. They are young people who have already filmed hundreds of hours but who lack analytical criteria about how or why to film. That’s why my first objective is to transmit and fall in love with the sacred and diverse that cinema can be. Because also here, globalization has not served to expand the variety, but to perpetuate the oligarchy of a standardized cinema from Hollywood. At twenty years of age, the ignorance of contemporary Spanish or European cinema and even less of classical cinema is almost absolute.

I have the impression that twenty years ago, when the leisure offer was very poor to the current one, there were more redoubts where the cinema claimed as art. The classical cinema was broadcast and analysed in a fixed space on public television and one could come across alternative proposals in the so-called art and rehearsal cinemas where some of us discovered our vocation. The idea of ​​a cinema that emerges to meet the new viewer has changed. Today discoveries are virtual, they concentrate on social networks and are not offered by critics but by studios or by large producers buying the so-called influencers, whose criteria are often doubtful.

My love for the cinema was forged by attending as a family to the movie theatres or watching the eternal cineforums televised on the second channel. I was lucky that passion was instilled in me at home. Those who did not have that fortune perhaps had a teacher who knew how to transmit that love for the other arts: literature, theatre, music or the fine arts.

The school and the university are a place of salvation for today’s unpopular depth in art or culture. As teachers we have a historical responsibility and we can not succumb to the pressure to let ourselves be carried away by lightness and boredom. In our hands is to condemn future generations to an impoverished idea of ​​cinema where evasion prevails over depth. It is necessary to let the cinema enter the classroom, as it was done with other arts, and not only when young people already believe they have discovered their vocation, but in primary and secondary where they can still discover, with the correct accompaniment, the multiplicity of tonalities that the seventh art offers.

DOCUMENTARIES WITHOUT STORY

Can  we make documentary films without a story? We use to define documentary film as a genre that tells real stories about real people. But what if we eliminate the “narrative” component of a non-fiction movie?

“CITY OF THE DEAD” IN PERSPECTIVE

Almost two years have passed since I began to think about “City of the dead” after finishing the documentary “Life and death of an architect“, which gave us enormous gratifications in exchange for many tolls: censorship, pressures and a filming style that I needed abandon to reconnect with a more direct language.

DOCUMENTARY FESTIVALS. WHAT FOR?

For many years I was extremely embarrassed to send my work to festivals. I considered the awards to be useless, predictable and rigged trophies that only those with a vibrant ego needed.

DOCUMENTARIES THAT TRAVEL

The effort to develop, finance and produce a documentary of just one hour involves, at least, one year of work by a team, as well as the financial funds to carry it out. I often receive projects with an eventual universal possibilities but raised in a local way and therefore, waste an enormous potential to travel.