- The Festival is scheduling several premieres and special screenings to celebrate, among others, the anniversaries of The Beatles and the premieres of The Clockwork Orange and Orquesta Club Virginia.
- The 66th Seminci will host -for the fourth consecutive year- the RTVE Gala and will celebrate the first Unesco Valladolid City of Film Gala with the aim of spreading the creative capacity of the city.
The 66th Valladolid International Film Festival this year will schedule several premieres and special screenings to celebrate different anniversaries, such as the 60th anniversary of the first Beatles concert or the 50th anniversary of the premiere of The Clockwork Orange and the 30th anniversary of Orquesta Club Virginia. The festival will also host the RTVE Gala, which will offer the world premiere of Pan de Limón y Semillas de Amapola, the latest film by Benito Zambrano, will hold the Unesco Valladolid City of Film Gala and will programme the premiere of the latest work by Fernando Colomo, in addition to premiering several documentary films, such as the one shot by Chema de la Peña about actress Charo López, Spike of Honour last year.
RTVE Gala: two world premieres
Seminci will host for the fourth consecutive year the RTVE Gala, in which the public broadcaster will preview one of its productions before its screening in commercial cinemas, as it did in 2018 with Sin fin, by brothers César and José Esteban Alenda, in 2019 with Salir del ropero, by the filmmaker Ángeles Reiné, and in 2020 with El año de la furia, by Rafa Russo. This year, the event will take place on Sunday 24th October at Zorrilla Theatre and will offer a double bill with the world premieres of Pan de limón con semillas de amapola, by Benito Zambrano, and Viaje a alguna parte, by Helena de Llanos.
Based on the novel of the same name by Cristina Campos and shot in Valldemossa, Pan de limón y semillas de amapola is the latest work by Benito Zambrano, the director who opened the 64th Seminci with his previous work, Intemperie. The film revolves around Anna (Eva Martín) and Marina (Elia Galera), two sisters who were separated as teenagers, who meet again to sell a bakery they have inherited from a mysterious woman they don’t think they know. In turn, Viaje a alguna parte, programmed in the Official Section out of competition and which will have its premiere at the RTVE Gala, is a mixture of fiction and documentary by Helena de Llanos, granddaughter of Fernando Fernán Gómez, who delves into the professional career and life of her grandfather and his wife, Emma Cohen, coinciding with the centenary of the birth of the Spanish actor and director. And all this from the discovery of piles of books, documents, photographs, letters and films that she discovered in the house she inherited and in which she lives.
Anniversaries: The Beatles, The Clockwork Orange and Orquesta Club Virginia
Seminci will commemorate the 60th anniversary of The Beatles’ first concert, held on February 9, 1961 at The Cavern Club in Liverpool, with a film marathon that, under the title Beatles Forever, will feature four films: the feature-length documentary The Beatles and India (Ajoy Bose and Peter Compton, 2021) – premiere in Spain out of competition in the Time of History section – accompanied by the documentaries The Beatles: Eight Days a Week. The touring years (Ron Howard, 2016), and Get Back (Richard Lester, 1991) as well as a restored copy of the musical comedy A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964).
The premiere of the documentary The Beatles and India at the 66th Seminci is accompanied by the organization in Valladolid of the exhibition by the same name “The Beatles and India”, which will be held at the House of India in Valladolid from 17th September to 7th November. The day will end with a concert of versions of the songs of the Liverpool quartet by Indian musicians Malavika Manoj, Tejas Menon and Neil Mukherjee, thus completing the activities of Beatles Forever.
Seminci is also celebrating the 50th anniversary of the international premiere of A Clockwork Orange, one of Stanley Kubrick’s most outstanding films, banned in several European countries and which took four years to be released in Spain due to its being banned by the Spanish dictatorship. That first screening in our country took place on 24th April 1975, amidst unusual expectation, surrounded by controversy and enormous security measures.
To celebrate this anniversary, the festival will screen a restored copy of A Clockwork Orange on Saturday 23rd October at Carrión Theatre, precisely the venue where that first screening in Spain took place, along with the premiere of the documentary La Naranja Prohibida, programmed out of competition at DOC.España, an original TCM production directed by Pedro González Bermúdez that reconstructs the events surrounding the first public screening of Stanley Kubrick’s film in Spain, held amidst great controversy at the 20th edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival in 1975. Both sessions will be attended by actor Malcolm McDowell, who played the main character in Kubrik’s film, the sociopath Alex Delarge, and who is also the narrator of the documentary.
The 66th Seminci will also celebrate the 30th anniversary of the premiere of the film Orquesta Club Virginia, by Manuel Iborra, with the premiere of the documentary La Club Virginia shot by Iborra himself and starring the original cast of the 1992 film: Jorge Sanz, Antonio Resines, Santiago Ramos, Enrique San Francisco, Juan Echanove, Pau Riba and Emma Suárez. La Club Virginia is a chronicle of a shoot full of problems of all kinds, both personal and cinematographic, but also a portrait of the failure of a director overcome by the film and of the unbreakable friendship that was created between its cast.
World premieres: Fernando Colomo, Charo López and stories of overcoming challenges
The 66th edition of Seminci will offer the public a series of films, out of competition, that can be seen for the first time by the festival audience. Thus, Cuidado con lo que Deseas, the new Christmas comedy by Fernando Colomo, starring Dani Rovira, Cecilia Suárez and José Sacristán, will be screened. Miguel (Dani Rovira) and Tamara (Cecilia Suárez) decide to spend Christmas with their young children in a cabin in the mountains. Grandfather Benigno (José Sacristán), endowed with magical powers, is unable to accompany them in the end, but the children steal his magic ball that grants wishes to those who possess it. With their wishes and the help of the ball, the children unwittingly give life to snowmen, sowing chaos in what was to be a peaceful family holiday.
Actress Charo López, Spike of Honour at the previous edition of Seminci, is the star of the documentary Me Cuesta Hablar de Mí, by Salamanca filmmaker Chema de la Peña, in which he reviews the life and work of the actress through the testimonies of Marisa López, Julieta Serrano, Ian Gibson, Eusebio Lázaro, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, Javier Gurruchaga, Manuel Hidalgo and the Salamanca actress herself.
Also in the documentary genre, the festival will premiere A cero. 5, in which film director Gonzalo Suárez Garayo narrates in first person his experience as a wheelchair basketball player in the famous Vigo club Amfiv, and Captain Nemo in the Battle Against ALS, by Miguel Martí, which through the experience of Mariano López, owner of a company called Captain Nemo, and an ALS sufferer, describes the experiences and everyday situations that a group of people with ALS have to face every day.
In addition, the documentary short film Un Memorial Contra la Injusticia y la Barbarie, by Diego P. Morán M., will also be shown for the first time, which shows the exhumation work of mass graves found in the cemetery of El Carmen in Valladolid by the Valladolid Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, and which culminates with the construction and inauguration of a Memorial pantheon where the remains of the 247 people exhumed in the cemetery have been buried.
Unesco Valladolid City of Film Gala
For the first time ever, this year Seminci will hold the Unesco Valladolid City of Film Gala, an event that aims to disseminate the creative audiovisual capacity of the city and highlight the common project that the UNESCO Creative Cities Network represents. The Gala will be the main event on 27th October, a day dedicated to Valladolid, City of Film. There will be a presentation of projects developed over the years by the City of Film/VAFO, and there will be two screenings.
On the one hand, the feature documentary All the Souls… (2020), by Valladolid-born director Roberto Lozano Bruna, a film with the participation of local production and artistic teams and financial support from VAFO, whose world premiere was in October 2020 at the Warsaw Festival and whose Spanish premierewas held as part of the last edition of the Malaga Festival. The film addresses human trafficking in Nepal, where the price of a girl ranges from $150 to $25,000 and between 6,000 and 12,000 women and children are sold every year. Shot in Nepal, India, Spain, Dubai, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, All the Souls… is the latest work of cinematographer Roberto Fraile, who was murdered on April 26th near the Arli National Park along with journalist and reporter David Beriain and Irish conservationist Rory Young.
On the other hand, the day will begin with a round table discussion on the preservation of European film collections and, precisely, the second screening will be a long documentary on one of the most relevant topics for UNESCO and the Creative Cities of Cinema Network: the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage linked to audiovisuals: Film, The Living Record of Our Memory, by Inés Toharia, in which audiovisual archivists, technicians and filmmakers from different parts of the world explain what film preservation is and why it is necessary. The film includes testimonies from filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas, Costa-Gavras, Ken Loach, Fernando Trueba, Patricio Guzmán, Margaret Bodde, Vittorio Storaro and Paula Félix-Didier.
Castilla León Film and Audiovisual Gala
On October 25th, the Castilla y eón Film and Audiovisual Gala will be held at Zorrilla Theatre, where the Spike of Honour will be awarded to actor Emilio Gutiérrez Caba and the film Vidas Pequeñas (2010), by Enrique Gabriel, a film that participated in the Official Section at the 55th Seminci, will be screened as a tribute. In addition, during the gala, the two winning projects of the short film contest Seminci Factory Valladolid Film Office will be premiered: The short films Frugal, by Juan Vicente Chuliá, a story about an emigrant of Russian origin and her seven-month-old daughter who live in extremely precarious conditions, and La Controversia de Valladolid, by Juan Rodríguez-Briso, a film that revolves around the historical debate and its consequences that took place in the 16th century between Bartolomé de las Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda about the natural rights of the Native Americans.
