FICX committed to risk, diversity and Iberoamerican cinema

The 58th edition of the Xixon International Film Festival (FICX), will happen from November 20th and November 28th to consolidate its commitment to independent cinema, promote the discovery of new authorships, the competitive exhibition of works without commercial distribution and the Spanish release of films by a new generation of Iberoamerican filmmakers.

The graphic identity of this edition, developed by, Marco Recuero, condenses the programmatic principles of the festival, throwing feminine, sharp and diverse "dart in the gaze". A colourful image of intense lights, as alive as independent cinema, Xixón and Asturias, a city and a region that is committed to #SafeCulture. 

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The official section regroups its films in three categories: Retueyos, (sprouts in Asturian language) which will present first, second or third feature films with a heterogeneous view and formal exploration; Albar, (noble and resistant wood in Asturian language) which accompanies in its cinematographic journey those who have contributed to shape the identity of the festival throughout its history; and Tierres en Trance, starting this year with the vocation of becoming a screen for an Iberoamerican cinema committed to its struggles.

The three sections have the same financial allocation. A prize of 10,000 euros will be awarded to the winning film in each section and the festival will add the Distribution Award, with another 3,000 euros for the distributor who acquires the rights to the film selected by the jury. 

As a first preview of the programme, the festival announces six films.

Among the films competing in the section Tierres en Trance we will be showing Eryk Rocha's Breve Miragem de Sol, which shows a journey into brazilian society through the eyes of a taxi driver on the night shift. It combines humour, empathy and social criticism. in Venezuela´s La fortaleza, director Jorge Thielen, reflects how the country is built on a turbulent history. In the same way, the director himself seeks to return to places that belonged to his memory.

In Retueyos, the Catalan director Meritxell Colell (Con el viento) will be premiering Transoceánicas, a work co-directed with Argentinian filmmaker Lucía Vassallo. A project at the intersection between text and images that arises from both filmmakers´s need to reconnect with Barcelona and Buenos Aires. The film is formed through the letters, emails and Skype sessions that they use to communicate over four years. A correspondence in which they travel from the past to the present, reviewing memories and moments houses and cities.

On the other hand, we will have the Spanish premiere of Entre perro y lobo, a Cuban-Spanish film premiered at the Berlinale by Irene Gutiérrez. It navigates between fiction and documentary, the memory of wars and ideals always under debate. A brave exercise around the passage of time and light. A song impossible to forget. The Cuban question, always alive. A certain nostalgia that, in the case of this island, can always be interpreted as a provocation.

Asturias is once again represented in competitive sections for the fourth consecutive year with works of great quality. In Albar, walking in the spirit of a bold, necessary cinema that arrives late and precisely because of this acquires the value of films filmed with a sense of duty, Ramón Lluís Bande will premiere Vaca Mugiendo entre ruinas, a physical journey from the mountains to the very center in Gijón, and a temporary one, that of the months that a civil war besieged Asturias resisted under the government of the Sovereign Council of Asturias and León, presided over by Belarmino Tomás. The documentary shows a Gijón that is defeated but exiled with the dignity of preventing, as one of its last gestures, a bloodbath before the fall of the city into the hands of Franco's troops.

Shirley, a biopic directed by american filmmaker Josephine Decker, is a superb formal exercise that captures a specific moment in the life of Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House. She was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the last Sundance Festival. The film is a feminist investigation of the dislocated, depressive, agoraphobic friendship between two women. Elizabeth Moss, who rose to fame after her role in Mad Men plays Shirley Jackson.

Isabella, awarded with a special mention in Berlin, is part of the series of adaptations of William Shakespeare's works that Matías Piñeiro has been filming for over a decade. It is an avant-garde sexual satire with splendid actresses. A free interpretation of the play Measure for Measure constructed from the casting to which the protagonist submits and the insecurities it causes her.

In collaboration with the Office of Equality Policies of Gijón City Council, the festival has organized two spotlights that will focus on the work of two Latin American directors, the Portuguese Leonor Teles and the Argentinian Ana Katz.

Leonor Teles, a very young woman, was born in Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal, in 1992 and began her career in filmmaking through a documentary search for places and images of her family origins in Balada de un batracio (2016). A ceramic frog and some humour allowed her to meet and reflect on his identity and the role of the Romani community in Portugal. Moreover, with this short film he won, at the age of 24, the Golden Bear for Best Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. Already in 2013, with her first short film Rhoma Acan, she was awarded at the IndieLisbon festival.

With the feature film Terra Franca (2018) filmed between the land and the sea, which in her cinema are not necessarily separate elements but parts of the same whole, she poses recognisable questions from a fisherman´s daily life. What happens when we are separated from a part of ourselves, from our journeys and our memory? The answers are never obvious, nor do they even appear in balance. Do we know where we want to be? Who are we going to be?

Teles, close and present in her cinema, unashamed about his own gaze, enters the film without any constraint, very conscious of the image as a language under construction destined to intimacy, encounter, getting to know and care for oneself. For her, the form of cinema is at the service of the community. Each community, therefore, has a different formal path to follow.

The Argentinean director Ana Katz, born in Buenos Aires in 1975, believes that women provide languages that did not appear in certain film spaces with the weight they deserve. As an approach in which the difference in class and generations has special importance in the lives of working women so that the world does not remain the same. For Katz, if cinema comes from patriarchal laws, it must be disarmed. If a film shoot is rigid, the cinema - hers does it - must challenge the safety of the established; of the creative and the productive. In the words of the filmmaker: "woman is not the mother or the sister. She is not a good or bad girlfriend. She goes through every register".

Katz has, in any case, chosen a relationship with comedy and family. His debut film, The Chair Game, shot at home in 2002 with a borrowed camera and quite a bit of improvisation, won a handful of international awards. The same happened with A friend from the park (2017), which won the audience award for best script at the Sundance Festival. They are both films that revolve around the son. Or about the relationship of the mother with her son and her surroundings.

Katz is also the protagonist of the romantic comedy Kiki, by Paco León, Una novia errante, Los Marziano or Sueño Florianópolis.

Among the parallel activities that will be announced in the coming weeks, we are presenting an exhibition in collaboration with the Municipal Foundation of Culture and the Popular University of Gijón/Xixón (FMCyUP) dedicated to Alberto Vázquez, one of the most recognized spanish illustrators and animators. He owns a very recognizable world with a superb character design. As an animation director his works have won three Goya Awards: Best Animated Short Film in 2012 for Birdboy and twice in 2017, winning the awards for Best Animated Film for Psiconautas and Best Animated Short Film for Decorado.