Catalan Focus

Section

This program will be a double-feature.

Vaca

Marga is bored of her routine: Every day, she gets up and goes to work at a local slaughterhouse, then takes the bus home after dark, goes to bed and waits to repeat the same motions the next day. That is until something completely unexpected catches her attention, a cow looks straight at her, and for the first time in her life, she realizes what she really wants to do.

Screening Dates, Times, and Venues

Guest Talk Session After Screening

Online
Screening

Director:Marta Bayarri

  • Spain
  • 2018
  • 15min
  • Color
  • Catalan
  • JPN & ENG Sub.

Marta Bayarri is an actress, writer and director based in Barcelona. She got her start as a director with the short Una Nit (2014). She followed it up with Fugit (2016), which was released to wide acclaim, achieving the Candidacy for the Goya Awards 2018. Vaca (2018) is her latest film. With a great international acceptance, it received a nomination at the HBO Ibero-American Short Film Award at the Miami Film Festival. It received the Candidacy for the Goya Awards 2020.

Director’s Statement

This story came to my life a few years ago and it stayed. The original text was born in a creation workshop led by the American playwright and director Neil Labute. He, as mentor, was the culprit of uniting the youth and the talent of the author of the original piece, Marc Guevara, with myself as an actress. The characters represent a great collective of people who live their lives hopeless. Marga is one of them. Marc had written a monologue piece with a deeply meaning, not only for what he said but how he said it. It was a story that was worth repeating. I wanted to take it to the cinema and give it a wider visual frame that allowed seeing the universe that the original text already insinuates. So I wrote the screenplay. To raise this project, we have been fortunate to have a fantastic team of great human and professional quality. I am very happy and also convinced that VACA is one of those stories that tell a lot more than it says. A story alive and necessary that gives us the flavour of hope when one has lost the illusion.

Director

Trailer

The Perseids

Local tales tell of a small town built on top of a Spanish Civil War battlefield. Mar arrives at the town to spend the strangest summer of her life after her parents’ divorce. She takes refuge in these mysterious post-war tales and in a group of teenagers that adhere to some rules unknown to her. She discovers a fascinating place and makes peace with her dad, mending family ties with this country’s memorial history.

Japanese Premiere

Screening Dates, Times, and Venues

Guest Talk Session After Screening

Online
Screening

Director:Annia Gabarró & Alberto Dexeus

  • Spain
  • 2019
  • 72min
  • Color
  • JPN & ENG Sub.

Alberto Dexeus and Ànnia Gabarró studied Audiovisual Communication in Pompeu Fabra University. Alberto did an exchange in Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires, he is the cocreator of the TV series “5 minuts tard” and codirector of the short “Monocigótico”. Ànnia also studies Modern literature in Universitat de Barcelona, she is the cocreator of the short doc “El que no ens fa diferents”.

Director’s Statement

Les Perseides is born from the will to shape different personal experiences of the authors. The inability to have an honest relationship with the father figure and the alienation in family spaces during the summer holidays are part of our lives. It is in one of these family towns where our grandparents spoke to us about episodes of the Civil War in a very blurred way, as if they were legends of the area or horror stories. Often, new generations no longer have the opportunity to discuss this topic with their grandparents, and therefore there is a generational break where certain information is lost. Part of the script arises from imagining stories in abandoned spaces where silence and the absence of historical memory have caused some objects and symbols to lose their original meaning to make way for new uses. Therefore, History is read as fiction, as a dream, as a ghost story.

Director

Trailer