The jewel of quinqui cinema Deprisa, Deprisa, restored in 4K and after passing through the Berlinale and SEMINCI; the memory of the figures of its director, Carlos Saura, and its editor, Pablo G. del Amo, and the iconic music of the genre, which will be performed by the Gipsy Power Band, will open the 53rd edition of ALCINE, the Film Festival of Alcalá de Henares / Community of Madrid.
With its programming now available and tickets on sale from today, ALCINE 53 was presented this morning at the Corral de Comedias in Alcalá, in an event attended by the artistic director of the festival, Pedro Toro; the Councilor for Culture of Alcalá de Henares, Santiago Alonso, and the person in charge of the Film Promotion Office of the Community of Madrid (Film Madrid), Xiomara García, along with more protagonists of ALCINE 53, such as the photographer Leticia Díaz de la Morena, the creative director of Equipo SOPA, responsible for the festival's poster, Luis León, and Pablo López, of Aula Film, responsible for ALCINE Kids.
“We have 12 programs from the National and European Contest, with a total of 51 short films, of the almost 1,300 films registered, which have been carefully chosen by our selection and programming committees,” said the artistic director of ALCINE, Pedro Toro. . 51 works that "will compete for these diamonds that have once again been recognized in the United States by the Academy, as qualifiers for the Oscar Awards, and here for the Goya, with that Short List that this year has its new format and of which many of the short films in competition at ALCINE are already part of it,” he highlighted.
With more than fifty editions behind it, “far from dwelling on its past, the secret of ALCINE's eternal youth lies in its commitment to the future, to younger, more creative and risky cinema,” he indicated during the presentation. the Councilor for Culture of Alcalá de Henares, Santiago Alonso, who recalled that “it is the oldest film competition in the Community of Madrid and one of the most traditional in the country.”
Xiomara García, head of the Filming Promotion Office of the Community of Madrid (Film Madrid), highlighted that “the talent and creativity of short films are the necessary germ to forge the productions of the feature films of the future.” And he congratulated Pedro Toro "for his brilliant work at the head of the festival, which in a very short time has managed to preserve the good things of previous editions and give a new stamp to the event".
After the opening concert of the festival on November 7 by Los Punsetes, who are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, on November 8 the ALCINE 53 Opening Gala will commemorate two other anniversaries with which it will pay tribute to two great figures of Spanish cinema : the 40 years of the Berlinale Golden Bear for Deprisa, Deprisa, Carlos Saura's masterpiece, and the two decades since the death of Pablo G. del Amo, its editor.
This emblematic work of Quinqui cinema is another example of the brilliance of the Saura-del Amo tandem. With it they raised this genre of social cinema to the level of art. The new 4K version of Deprisa, Deprisa, restored by FlixOlé and Mercury Films and premiered in February at the Berlin Festival, will have its premiere in the Community of Madrid at the ALCINE 53 Opening Gala, after passing through the SEMINCI.
In this edition of ALCINE there will be a triple tribute to Pablo G. del Amo, the master who, with the help of a sharp blade on his moviola, cut and assembled the plans for The Hunt, The Spirit of the Beehive and many other masterpieces of our work. cinema: along with the screening of Deprisa, Deprisa, the festival remembers him this year through its new project ARCHIVO ALCINE, with the digital reissue of the book that the festival dedicated to him in 1987, written by Manuel Hidalgo and with a prologue by Manuel Vicent , as well as a small exhibition in the Espacio ALCINÉFILO.
The screening of Deprisa, Deprisa will be presented by the director of the FlixOlé-URJC Chair of Spanish Cinema, Mario Rajas, and will feature interventions by Miguel López (Flixolé), who will explain the laborious restoration process of the film; David 'El Indio' (drummer of Vetusta Morla and creator of the Gipsy Power Band), who will reflect on his music; and, to talk about the Saura-Del Amo relationship in the film, there is no one like Antonio Frutos (AMAE), an editor who has alternated heist films (Bajo cero, Cien años de excusa…) with documentaries about the figure of the Aragonese director ( Saura(s), by Félix Viscarret, 2018).
The music of quinqui cinema, so representative of the genre through the songs of Los Chichos, Los Chunguitos or Las Grecas, will also be present at the ALCINE 53 Opening Gala with the Gipsy Power Band and its project 'La Banda Sonora del Cine Quinqui', in which David 'El Indio' (drummer of Vetusta Morla) is accompanied by some of the best musicians of the funk and flamenco scene.
Together with Deprisa, Deprisa, ALCINE 53 will bring many other beautiful pieces to its three screens (at the Teatro Salón Cervantes, the Corral de Comedias and Gilitos-Laboratorio de Creación Alcalá). The ALCINE 53 programming, now available, includes the 51 films that can be seen in the National Competition and the European Short Film Competition, the Open Screen feature films and the ESFAA - European Audience Awards. There are also new sections in competition, such as AL(U)CINE, which recovers the times of the long-awaited Fantastic and Horror Film Festival.
The 53rd edition of ALCINE consolidates the new initiatives of the festival and adds others that expand the offer in accessibility and conciliation, such as Sesión Continua or the 'Teta Session' ALBIBE, which also confirm the Gilitos-Laboratorio de Creación Alcalá cultural center as its third screen big.
Podcasts will once again have a prominent space, both professionally (with 'This has already been done', from the ALMA screenwriters' union), and socially, thanks to the collaboration between AFA Alcalá and the Alicante journalist Raúl Cornejo's program, ' Vivir Rodando', which demonstrate that cinema is an efficient tool of mediation, education and understanding between people, as one of the most indelible parts of our collective memory.
The rescue of that memory refers to ARCHIVO ALCINE, one of the projects that this edition also starts to value, preserve and digitize the vast bibliographic and documentary heritage of the festival. And the decision to inaugurate the edition not with a premiere, but with a restoration, is a declaration of intentions.
There will also be concerts, talks, professional meetings and exhibitions, such as 'Close up nobody is normal', the exhibition of photographs by Leticia Díaz de la Morena. The photographer from Coslada, specialized in editorial, fashion and social events, has photographed artists such as Vigo Mortensen, Mario Casas, Rosalía and Penélope Cruz. ALCINE will show its most cinematic side in this exhibition.
The exhibition, in which “there are unpublished photos that have not been seen in other exhibitions,” was created “to give value to editorial photography, the photography that appears in magazines, which is that journalistic photography that is not so much the one that appears in the newspaper or what we see every day,” explained its author.
And, since films can also be “a transversal tool in the classroom”, as Pablo López (Aula Film), head of ALCINE Educación, the educational sections of ALCINE, has indicated, with a demand that reached 12,000 applications in the last edition , also include “a workshop for teachers so that they can work on the concepts of film appreciation and audiovisual literacy in the classroom, to help their students read the image in a world in which the image is everywhere.”
With sharp and incisive short films and feature films by new (and not so new) directors polished in the short and in the festival itself, from November 7 to 17 ALCINE 53 invites us to “sharpen our gaze” on reality. An idea that is present in the poster of this edition of ALCINE, in which a scissors and a sharpening stone are the protagonists; work, like the previous two, by Equipo SOPA, which thus completes the trilogy with which this new stage of the festival begins.
“That whetstone and that scissors stuck like King Arthur's sword allow us to ask ourselves about the power of short pieces and well-cut pieces, about the value of the sharp, the sharp; but above all it is a stone to sharpen the gaze for an edition that is more incisive than ever in the search for unique pieces that will deserve the great ALCINE diamonds,” said Luis León, creative director of Equipo SOPA, also responsible for those diamonds that ALCINE will deliver to its winners.
“The stone has become a symbol, a hallmark for a festival that is dedicated to discovering precious stones, rough diamonds, small jewels that end up becoming the first stone of great cinematographic careers,” he added.
