Fims Festivals
Scotland’s Ibero-American documentary film festival, we caught up with Mar Felices, the festival’s artistic director.
This year, the LSFF’s 5th Spring Weekend brings to London audiences two very special previews of films that will be released later in the year: ‘El Niño’, directed by Daniel Monzón (Cell 211), an enthralling drug-trafficking action film based on real events and set in the Straits of Gibraltar, and the noirish thriller ‘La isla mínima’, directed by Alberto Rodríguez, which won nine Awards at the Goyas 2015. Also we have the opportunity to watch on a big screen ‘Todos están muertos’, by Beatriz Sanchí, with acclaimed actress Elena Anaya, who was nominated for Best Actress at the Goyas 2015. Jorge Torregrossa’s ‘La vida inesperada’, a film led hand in hand by Javier Cámara and Raúl Arévalo with a script by renowned writer and journalist Elvira Lindo and Carlos Marqués-Marcet’s ‘10,000 Km’, which took home five awards in last year’s Málaga Film Festival.
Brit Es couldn’t pass up the opportunity to chat to one of our most restless and creative actors. Punctual, good-natured and always charming, we took the opportunity to show our readers some of the keys to his interesting path.
Leonor Watling, the Spanish actress and singer (who has an English mother and a Spanish father) is without a doubt one of our most multitalented and driven actresses, creatively speaking. She jumps from one discipline to another as naturally as she does between her two mother tongues. Not only does she sing in the band Marlango, she has also brought us such characters as Elvira in “My Mother Likes Women” and that neighbour who S. Polley chooses to replace her after her death in Isabel Coixet’s moving “My Life Without Me”.
In a tourist-packed Puerta Del Sol, Madrid, a silver painted Jesus Christ (with his 8-year-old son, since it’s Dad’s custody time, of course), a green army man, SpongeBob Squarepants, an Invisible Man and Minnie Mouse, perform a heist on a pawn shop. The police arrive, capture the invisible man and Minnie Mouse, and gun down poor old SpongeBob. José (the silver Christ, played by Hugo Silva) and Tony (green army man, played by Mario Casas) hijack a taxi, driver and passenger included, and drive away, intending to escape to France. Before they can get there, though, they get stuck in a small border town called Zugarramurdi, home to a coven of evil witches led by Graciana (the always welcome Carmen Maura).
La Gran Familia Española (Family United) tries really hard to please everyone. With its pastel and gold palette, handsome cast in suspenders and Converse, a painful wedding entrance music montage to the sound of Calvin Harris’ Feel So Close and, of course, the backdrop of the almighty Spanish national team beating Holland at the South Africa 2010 World Cup Final, the film is really desperate to have in its poster one of those laurel encircled quotes saying something like “…feel-good movie of the year!”.
The 57th edition of the BFI London Film Festival, in association with American Express ®, offers a diverse programme of films and events over twelve days of celebration of international cinema.