Cinema as an act of resistance

Bi Gan, Gabriel Mask, Fernando Franco,

The 70th edition of the Valladolid International Film Week (SEMINCI) today experienced an intense day, in which three long-awaited titles were premiered in the Official Section: the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale, The blue path of Gabriel Mascaro, y Resurrection, of Bi Gan, Special Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Festival, in addition to the latest film directed by Fernando Franco, Subsoil, which was screened for the first time at Seminci. In the first of the two RTVE Galas of this edition, the public was able to attend the premiere of Frontera, of Judith Colell, at the Carrión Theater.

The first day of the festival began with the ambitious tribute to cinema that the Chinese director Bi Gan has devised in Resurrection. Starring Taiwanese star Shu Qi, The film proposes a parallel universe where humans have lost the ability to dream. «We wanted to cover a certain time cycle, start at the beginning of cinema and end up feeling what the turn of the century was like. Each chapter corresponds to a film genre, but also to the five senses,” explained the director, who has offered a hopeful message. «I think we have to go back to traditional, old, pure, simple things. Our knowledge of the world seems flawed, but it is what builds our consciousness and our society; “It’s what makes us human.”

A humanist message is the one that the Brazilian has also launched Gabriel Mascaro in The blue path a luminous story that reinvents the way of narrating old age in cinema. The film, which has premiered in Spain at Seminci, tells the unexpected journey through the Amazon that Teresa, 77, undertakes, fleeing the residence to which the government forces her to move at the end of her period of work productivity.

“I wanted to make a film about the resignification of the life of an older person that was not about finitude, death or nostalgia,” Mascaro explained. The Brazilian director has recognized the influence of works such as Amor, of Michael Haneke, o Tales from Tokyo, of Yasujiro Ozu, but with the intention of separating from them: «I remembered a lot of Before Sunrise, by Richard Linklater and that chance love encounter. I wanted the movie to be something like that; “playing with this tradition, but displaced on an elderly body as an act of resistance and transgression,” he explained at a press conference.

Spanish presence

The Spanish director Fernando Franco has presented in official competition Subsoil, and thriller psychological that dissects family ties from guilt, secrets and contained desire. The film, starring Julia Martinez y Diego Garisa, marks a stylistic evolution for Franco: «My recurring way of recording has been the use of sequence shots and a shoulder camera. But now I wanted to distance myself from that and access a slightly more sophisticated way.

The actors have highlighted the importance of working on intimacy to face the most intense scenes. «It has been very easy, even though the film is tense and tangled. We knew each other before and the fact that we were friends has allowed us to work from safety,” Garisa stated about the scenes of “deep twisted intimacy.” They have also been present at the presentation of Subsoil the actors Itzan Escamilla e Inigo of the Church and the writer Marcelo Luján.

The RTVE Gala hosted the world premiere at the Carrión Theater in Frontera, of Judith Colell. The current director of the Academy of the Catalan Cinema recovers the anonymous heroes of the Pyrenees. This thriller period set in 1943 rescues from oblivion the story of the inhabitants of a Pyrenean town who risked their lives to save hundreds of refugees fleeing the Nazi regime.

«Reviewing the past and recovering memory are the only way to understand what is happening. And this is as important now, in the midst of the genocide, as it was three years ago with the migratory phenomenon,” Colell declared, establishing a direct bridge between the past and the present. The director has highlighted that she was trying to “get out of her comfort zone” by entering period cinema with a larger budget for the first time: “It is always more complicated for women to access these spaces and, therefore, I tend to make more intimate films.”

One of its protagonists, the actor Miki Sparbé, who has come to Valladolid to present the film with Maria Rodriguez Soto y Asier Etxeandía, has underlined the film’s message of hope: «It is a call to action in times of barbarism and, at the same time, it is a message of hope. “Thanks to people like this town, many lives have been saved and continue to be saved.”

Historical and personal memory

Historical memory has covered other sections during this day. Within Castilla y León in Largo, Ruben Seca signs an intersection between national and family memory in The Crabs, filmed in Soria for five years, “a diamond in the rough with places to explore” for film shoots, according to the director. Following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather’s memories, he offers an exercise in reconstruction based on the silenced voices in a region that, although far from the battle front, carries with it the wound of oblivion and the echo of repression. «In some places there were not two opposing sides in the Civil War; “It was the repression of some on others, especially in Castilla y León.”

The memory of the Palestinian people reflected in Palestine 36, a historical drama from the Tunisian director Annemarie Jacir, focuses on a crucial year for understanding the Middle East conflict: “I hope that this film can resonate greatly with the public, make them understand the importance of that year 1936 and its immediate resonance with the present,” he shared Karim Anaya, one of the performers of the film, along with Jeremy IronsLiam Cunningham y Hiam Abbas, scheduled in the Meeting Point section.

In the History Time section, the actress and director Romane Bohringer has presented Tell Her I Love Her. “A mix between fiction and the adaptation of another person’s story in which I see myself reflected, about loss, the absence of a mother and childhood marked by death and how in our lives we try to evolve to become a better adult,” explained the director.

The irrational fear of losing her partner when she was pregnant with her second child is the starting point from which it arises. Reading, feature film programmed at Punto de Encuentro directed by Alex Poukin, who has visited Valladolid with the protagonist Manon Clavel, who plays a character inspired by a friend of the director, who is both a social and sex worker, and tired of both jobs.

Dane Komljen, director of Desire Lines, film programmed in Alchemies, presents in his third feature film, about an insomniac character who wanders through Belgrade chasing a mysterious brother, the disobedient dimension of the human being, the part that resists being pigeonholed and where this can lead him.

First short film session

The short format has also starred this day, with the screening of four short films from the Official International Short Film Section: No Skate!, Nervous Energy, Klonter and the work of the Spanish Gala Hernandez (César Award for Fluid Mechanics), +10K, that delves into the life of a 21-year-old boy who dreams of earning 10,000 euros a month, following the advice of cryptobrokers and online influencers.

Saturday also featured the Special Screening of Isabel Coixet’s glasses, a documentary of the program Essentials directed by Santiago Tabernero. This work draws an intimate portrait of the director, exploring her obsessions, the evolution of her vision and her way of understanding cinema, through testimonies from directors and actors such as Clara Roquet, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa and Javier Cámara, as well as regular collaborators. “I think it is impossible to understand the generational change of women that is currently taking place in Spanish cinema without that precedent of Isabel Coixet and her solid career,” says Tabernero.