Guerín's San Sebastián Winner Debuts in Canary Islands

Director José Luis Guerín, born in Barcelona in 1960, will premiere his latest film, Historias del buen valle (2025), this Friday at 9:00 PM in the Canary Islands. The screening will take place at Sala Timanfaya in Puerto de la Cruz, as part of the Canary Islands International Reality Film Festival, Miradas Afroindígenas. The film recently won the Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival. To attend, tickets must be bought through the festival's website: miradasafroindigenas.com.

Before the screening, Guerín will also meet with the Miradas Afroindígenas audience. This conversation with Canarian filmmaker Nayra Sanz Fuentes will start at 7:00 PM at Sala Timanfaya. Entry to this event is free until the venue is full.

Historias del buen valle explores a neighborhood on the outskirts of Barcelona, nestled between rural and urban areas. It has become a small global community, shaped by the coexistence of its first migrants, who arrived after the Civil War, and more recent newcomers.

The festival chose to feature Historias del buen valle because, as described in its catalog, it "combines different perspectives, social, generational, and identity conflicts, as well as urban and ecological issues. Yet, it also offers a calm and human view of today's world."

Guerín, the Barcelona-born filmmaker, has an impressive career recognized at many international festivals. His first feature film, Los motivos de Berta (1983), received a special mention at the San Sebastián Festival and a Special Quality Award from the Ministry of Culture. He gained international recognition with Innisfree (1990), which was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and won awards at several Spanish festivals.

En construcción (2000) is likely his most famous film, earning him a Goya for Best Documentary Film, along with the Special Jury Prize and the Fipresci International Critics' Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival. Among his more recent works, La academia de las musas (2015) stands out, having won the Giraldillo de Oro at the Seville European Film Festival and Best Fiction Direction at the Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival.

The Miradas Afroindígenas Market aims to create opportunities in the film industry for unique and creative reality cinema, focusing on stories told by the filmmakers themselves. It seeks to foster collaboration between countries in the Global South, using the Canary Islands' strategic location in the Atlantic. By leveraging its historical and geographical connections, the market establishes an international hub in Tenerife for reality cinema professionals who explore and narrate the Global South from an insider's perspective.

This approach makes Puerto de la Cruz an ideal spot for projects seeking funding and for finished productions looking for distribution or exhibition. In this way, the Canary Islands act as a bridge and meeting point between Africa, Latin America, and Europe, and indeed the rest of the world, for films from the Global South.

The market provides a space for the industry to help projects grow through their various stages, from development to production. It also facilitates collaboration between African, European, and Latin American productions, connecting these regions with other increasingly important parts of the Global South.

This vision is why Proexca, the internationalization program of the Government of the Canary Islands, supports this important meeting point, which offers significant benefits for Canarian reality cinema. Pablo Martín Carbajal, CEO of Proexca, explains, "Proexca supports Miradas Afroindígenas from two angles. Firstly, to boost the Canary Islands' audiovisual sector, support documentary filmmaking, and help international projects move through the Canary Islands. Secondly, we strongly value this three-continent approach, positioning the Canary Islands as a hub for storytelling between Africa, Latin America, and the Islands."

The Miradas Afroindígenas Market has also created RealDocs, a lab and pitching forum. It's designed for filmmakers from Africa and Ibero-America who have documentary projects in development that tell stories about countries in the Global South. Coordinated by Stephanie von Lukowicz, RealDocs has selected eight projects. One of these is Taki Onqoy by Peruvian filmmaker Álex Cruz Cusihuamán. Filmed in Quechua, the native language of the communities featured, it portrays the lives of older Quechua generations in Peru as symbols of a fading era of cultural and spiritual resistance.

Cruz states that his filmmaking style avoids a hierarchical structure and is deeply rooted in how communities live, where every decision goes through a collective assembly. He sees co-production agreements as forming "a larger collective, with colleagues who share language and communities, like Bolivia; we understand co-production as a relationship with someone who dialogues with the way we see the world," rather than following typical industry models.

Peruvian producer and director Diego Sarmiento Pagán, while not rejecting commercial distribution that could reach thousands, prefers to "take the films to the communities where I filmed them." He aims for "impact production," a way of showing films that combines social and community engagement, where the screening sparks further discussions and activities within the audience communities.

He explains that this means "the film is used as a tool to do more than just screen it and converse, but also to hold a workshop, an activity that lasts several days..." "I am learning to do that, because it's not something I've been taught," he notes, recalling an experience where a screening of one of his films about agriculture was followed by seed exchange activities among young people.

The other projects participating in RealDocs include:

• I Heard the Calling: The Return of Thetupinambá Cloak (Robson Dias, Célia Tupinambá, Myrza Muniz; Brazil): This film proposes the recovery of ancestral artifacts held in European museums as a spiritual, political, and historical act.
• I Must Be With Javi (Rodrigo Michelangeli, Venezuela): The director reconstructs the life of his brother Javi, who died at age eight before the director was born.
• Medina (Mauro and Emilia Pérez Quinteros; Spain, Argentina): Features a rodeo champion facing the end of his career after his first injury in 20 years.
• Semillas de Kivu (Néstor López, Spain): Depicts an extraordinary conflict experienced by a group of women from Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, who became pregnant after being gang-raped in one of the world's most violent areas.
• Serraria (Ricardo Imakawa, Matias Borgström; Brazil): Shows the expropriation of land belonging to the traditional Caiçara fishing community in favor of a Portuguese luxury resort, seen through the eyes of cousins Ícaro and Mateus.
• Taken by the White Man (Ana Sofia Fonseca, Portugal): Features a man from Mozambique who returns from Portugal to his home country in search of his family and identity, after being captured by the colonial army in 1967 and becoming a war mascot.
• Thus Spoke The Mountains (Álvaro and Diego Sarmiento, Peru): A poetic journey into the customs and religious traditions of the Peruvian Andes.
• The previously mentioned Taki Onqoy (Alex Cruz Cusihuamán, Peru) completes the selection.

These projects are presented to a panel of international experts, a crucial first step that can lead to co-production agreements with key decision-makers. This year's panel includes representatives from television channels and platforms such as Arte TV (France), Asharq Documentary (Saudi Arabia), ORF (Austria), RAI Documentari & RAI Cultura (Italy), RTP2 (Portugal), TVP (Poland), 3Cat (Catalonia), RTVE (Spain), and TVC (Canary Islands).

Also participating are distributors Bendita Films (Canary Islands), 3boxmedia (Germany), Cats & Docs (France), Digital 104 (Canary Islands), Jambika docs (Spain), Limonero films (United Kingdom), New Docs (Germany), and Preciosa Media (Colombia). Finally, the list includes funds from Sheffield DocFest (England), Idfa Bertha Fund (Netherlands), The Wickers (England), Europa Creative Media (EU), and IFIC (Canary Islands).