Last year, and coinciding with the disappearance of its founder, the FICX inaugurated the Isaac del Rivero Award, dedicated to recognising the artistic career of personalities linked to our region, and the Asturian actor Javier Gutiérrez became the first winner. In 2020, the presentation of the 2nd Isaac del Rivero Award has been postponed for the time being with the idea of carrying it out, in person and in our city, as soon as circumstances allow its organisation.
As far as the Nacho Martínez Award is concerned, this award will not be continued after the death last August of the artist Jaime Herrero, who manufactured the statuette given to the winners every year. He was undoubtedly the heart and soul of this award, whose human and artistic values were personified by Jaime himself, and who for eighteen years brought some of the leading figures of our cinema to Gijón to honour the memory of the much-loved actor from Mieres, Nacho Martínez.
This year, the Festival will once again serve as the setting for the Women in Film Award, an award given every year by the Women in Film Association in collaboration with the Gijón/Xixón Office for Equality. The winner in 2020 is the great Sol Carnicero, who will collect the award in Madrid, at the headquarters of the Spanish Academy of Film Arts and Sciences, at an event that can be followed simultaneously via streaming on our website, the Women of Film website and the Academy website.
Finally, the Festival wishes to dedicate its 58th edition to the memory of former colleague Elena Figaredo, who died last March, victim of the COVID-19. We leave you below our text in homage.
Too many women have been judged by their appearance. Many others have overcome this male chauvinist prejudice with their ability, perseverance and stamina. Elena Figaredo - whom some have mistaken for fragile - was one of them. She was part of a generation of Spaniards who, from the world of cinema, broke the mould. Between 1979 and 1993, from a table, armed with a dozen coffees a day and a packet of Ducados that never managed to break the sweetness of the Venezuelan leave of her voice, she was General Secretary and cornerstone of the Gijón International Film Festival.
Pedro Alberto Marcos wrote the Festival's newspaper at the time. More than a colleague, he was a friend and remembers a certain sense of guilt inherent in living with the constancy of Elena Figaredo. "I never arrived before her, I never left after her. Elena was the work capacity personified. Without her, the festival would have been in vain''. If all those who worked with her agree on something, it is in a gesture, a real, defining one: in order for her to leave that office on Paseo de Begoña, she had to be taken away. Lift her in the arms of her chair.
Today, a film festival has a Director, Head of Invitations, Press, Administration, Production or Protocol. In that world, and in those days, analogical, celluloid, when even the sending of copies through customs was managed, the Film Festival depended to a great extent on Elena, who sat in front of her typewriter as soon as she decided which journalists would travel to the Festival that year as she located a lost bill.
And Marcos points out that if something characterised the figure of Elena, in that role as the backbone of the Festival, it was that it was not imposed by the position but by the example. "Without a shout, a bad gesture, a bad face, an out of tune". Her thing was facts, she recalls. "If a problem had to be solved, whatever it was, she did it with such solvency that it didn't take long for her to become a reference for everyone.
Even at the worst moments, which in a festival are the days before, when they are attacked, muddled, frenetic and prone to chaos, Elena, with a flat face, soft gestures, sober elegance and hair like a garçon, smiled. A lot. And then she would reassure the others with a gesture. The Festival was on her agenda, methodical. Everyone knew about it. Directors come and go, people like Elena allow institutions to survive.
Ángel Alonso, who was a member of the Festival's Management Committee in the 1982 edition, has a similar memory of Elena. "When you saw her, you would say, this woman is little thing but, in two looks, she invaded you from a smile, overwhelmed you with details and gave you a lesson in leadership. Her involvement was unsurpassed. She was in everything. The Festival was her. And no answers, no outbursts of tone, no nerves, no high-pitched voices," adds Alonso.
When she left the Gijón Film Festival, Elena did not abandon the audiovisual world. Whether in the public company Ibermedia, which coordinates Latin American productions, in the Casa de América, in the production company Lola Films or in the Expo in Zaragoza, for more than two decades Elena continued to produce, organise and manage the most important, perhaps the most discreet, work in this sector. Some of the most important names in Spanish cinema benefited from her good work: Carlos Saura, Fernando Trueba, Pedro Almodóvar, Álex de la Iglesia, Gerardo Vera and Vicente Aranda.
From her facet as head of production, her good friend of so many years, Teresa Fernández Cuesta, director of the production company OASIS P.C., leaves a wound clear: "I have a project underway that now without Elena..." because she does not hesitate to say that "she was the best production secretary I have ever known working in cinema".
Elena died in March 2020 in Madrid, at the age of 67, a victim of the coronavirus. And as the Festival's Director, Alejandro Díaz Castaño, states, "the 58th edition of FICX, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of our recent history, will be dedicated to her memory".
A tribute article by the FICX - Gijón International Film Festival/Xixón team.
The 58th edition of the Gijón/Xixón International Film Festival will undoubtedly be one of the most atypical ones since its creation in 1963. Due to the current pandemic and the restrictions derived from it, and thanks to planning that began as early as March, the Festival has transformed the face-to-face actions into a series of online events that can be enjoyed through the FICX.TV portal. But obviously the current situation forces us to modify several aspects of our event, and among the most affected are our recognitions and tributes.