ALCINE 53, the Alcalá de Henares / Community of Madrid Film Festival, celebrates its Opening Gala this Friday and begins its first weekend full of activities, in which the 51 films in competition in the National Contest and the European Short Film Competition. Short Music, the start of ALCINE Film Jam (the contest for express short films, recorded in 72 hours, from November 8 to 11), the ALCINE Educación and ALCINE Pro sessions or the II Videomapping Exhibition are other activities that we await you in the first three days of this edition of ALCINE.
The Opening Gala of ALCINE 53 (this Friday, at 8:00 p.m., at the Teatro Salón Cervantes, with free admission without going through the box office) will be dedicated to quinqui cinema and two masters of our cinema: Carlos Saura and Pablo G. del Amo, director and editor respectively of Deprisa, deprisa (1981), which can be seen today during the gala in its digitized version in 4K, after passing through the Berlin Festival and SEMINCI.
In addition, the Gipsy Power Band (a project by David 'El Indio', in which he is accompanied by some of the best musicians of the funk and flamenco scene) will provide the soundtrack to a genre of which the songs of Los are iconic. Chichos, Las Grecas or Los Chunguitos.
From this Friday until Sunday, you can also see the 51 works in competition in the National Competition and the European Short Film Competition that will compete for the ALCINE diamonds and for their qualification for the Oscar® (and for the Goya, in the case of the winning short in the National Contest). They will be screened in 12 thematic sessions at the Teatro Salón Cervantes and the Corral de Comedias, six for the National Competition and six for the European Competition, with titles such as 'Chapuzones', 'Family Scenes' or 'Fly me to the moon', for the Spanish shorts, or 'Sighting', 'Treasures' or 'Areas of interest' for Europeans. In all cases, the screenings will have more space this year for discussion with their creators.
Short films, ALCINE's leitmotif, will not be the only reason to visit the festival this weekend. The music will continue on Saturday with Short Music, an event with three avant-garde musical proposals in short format: Cabiria, the tribute by the prestigious comic author Lorenzo Montatore to Talking Heads and Anna Otta. It will be on Saturday, at 9:00 p.m., at the Corral de Comedias.
ALCINE Film Jam also starts this Friday, the marathon of super-short and super-fast films, recorded in 72 hours, between today and next Monday. Also ALCINE Pro, the section dedicated to professionals in the sector. And, among other proposals (such as the ALCINE Kids workshops, now complete), you can see the II Videomapping Exhibition, by the students and teachers of Audiovisual Graphics at the Alberto Corazón Art School in Alcalá de Henares.
Yesterday ALCINE had its first round with a full house at the inaugural concert of Los Punsetes at the Teatro Salón Cervantes, in which there was also a memory for the people affected by the tragedy in Valencia and Albacete. “From here we believe and defend that culture is a refuge, sometimes physical, almost always spiritual for dark moments, and we want to dedicate this 53rd edition of the festival to all the people affected by DANA, and to all the sister festivals and colleagues of the affected areas, such as those from Subtitulam, projectionists for the festival, who have come from Valencia but have left their hearts there,” said the artistic director of ALCINE, Pedro Toro, at the beginning of the concert.
