ROSSY DE PALMA
V Isaac del Rivero Award for artistic career
Presentation of the award at the Gala Opening Ceremony
15 nov, 12:00, Escuela de Comercio:
Meeting with press and public
The first time Rossy de Palma worked with Pedro Almodóvar, the director told the make-up artist not to do her make-up, the hairdresser not to do her hair and the wardrobe department not to dress her so that she could do everything herself. The anecdote was told by the actress in an interview with Cadena SER. In La ley del deseo (1987), the new winner of the Isaac del Rivero Award appears in pale pink and black, barefoot, with a marvellous toupee, authentic, attractive and with her big, lined eyes fixed on Eusebio Poncela. That was her first film sequence.
Almodóvar would cast her again in his next film, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988), to play Antonio Banderas’ unfriendly girlfriend and create the iconic scene of the dream orgasm. She was one of the Almodóvar girls exuding talent and style in ¡Átame! (1989), Kika (1994), La flor de mi secreto (1995), Los abrazos rotos (2009), Julieta (2016) and Madres paralelas (2021).
Outside the world of El Deseo, Rossy de Palma has worked at the orders of Álex de la Iglesia, Antonio Mercero, Joaquim Jordà, Javier Elorrieta and Juanma Bajo Ulloa. And outside Spain, she has filmed with Robert Altman, Terry Gilliam, Marjane Satrapi and Karim Dridi (her work in Hors Jeu with the Tunisian director won her an award at Locarno).
While European cinema, television and theatre offered her more and more roles, Rossy de Palma was adding awards and nominations (she was nominated for the Goya for Best Supporting Actress for La flor de mi secreto and Kika), as well as being a regular guest at international festivals, such as Cannes, where she chaired the jury of the Caméra D’Or in 2022.
The audiovisual sector didn’t look away from this unique artist either: Rossy de Palma has starred in music videos for artists such as George Michael, Bryan Ferry and Clara Luciani. And while all this was happening, the actress became one of fashion’s muses, modelling on Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier’s runways.
Daughter of Asturians, Rosa Elena García Echave, (Palma de Mallorca, 1964) is Rossy de Palma, an emblematic artist and a woman with an inspiring social commitment. The Xixón International Film Festival awards her the Isaac del Rivero Award for all those sublime and unforgettable moments she has left us in film, with the certainty that she will leave us even more.
ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI
FICX 2024 Honor Award
Presentation of the award at the Closing Gala
Special pass with meeting:
21 nov, 22:00, Teatro Jovellanos, Harvest
Meeting with the press and the public:
23 nov, 11:00, Escuela de Comercio
Athina Rachel Tsangari is one of the leading representatives of the new wave of Greek cinema alongside filmmakers such as Yorgos Lanthimos and Alexandros Avranas. The screenwriter, director and producer moved to New York in her early years to study theatre history and, thanks to a scholarship that took her to Austin (Texas), she met, by chance or fate, the director Richard Linklater while he was looking for actors for his legendary Slacker (1990). Without intending to, Tsangari becomes part of the cast with a small role that will make her change the course of her career to become a filmmaker. She studied film directing at the University of Texas and, together with her classmates, created the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, which featured the first works of renowned filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Kelly Reichardt.
Tsangari made the leap to directing with Fit (1994), a short film in which the constants of her cinema were already apparent: an uncomfortable and appealing strangeness and a choreographic approach to human behaviour. She filmed her debut feature The Slow Business of Going (2000) over a period of five years in different hotel rooms around the world. The film premiered at the Thessaloniki Film Festival and won the Best Film Award at the New York Underground Film Festival.
After living abroad, the filmmaker returned to Greece to be part of the new wave that introduced the independent production model that existed in the USA during the 1990s: little money and several friends. She became the producer of Yorgos Lanthimos’ first films: Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth (2007) and Alps (2011) and, in between, she consolidated her position as a director with Attenberg (2010), chosen to represent Greece at the Oscars. Built on the archetypes of Thanatos and Eros, the film opens with one of the most bizarre kisses in the history of cinema, includes the music of Suicide and features the performances of Yorgos Lanthimos (who also signs on as producer), and a fantastic Ariane Labed, who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. Nothing more to ask for.
This was followed by the celebrated The Capsule (2012) and Chevalier (2015), for which Tsangari won, among others, the Best Film Award at the BFI London Film Festival. And almost ten years later, the director of the symbolic and the impure gives us Harvest (2024), a fable about pre-industrial society where each frame reveals the brilliance of a meticulous gaze. In a well deserved recognition for her valuable contribution to the seventh art, the Gijón / Xixón International Film Festival awards Athina Rachel Tsangari the 2024 Award of Honour.
ADO ARRIETA
Honorary Award
Presentation of the award at the Gala Opening Ceremony
Projections:
17 nov, 17:00, Las intrigas de Sylvia Couski, Encuentro
18 nov, 21:45, Flammes, Presentación
19 nov, 19:00, Vacanza permanente + Tam Tam, Encuentro
20 nov, 17:00, La imitación del ángel + Bella durmiente, Encuentro
Ado Arrieta has the excited and lively gaze of a child who discovers the world and is surprised. This is how the filmmaker transfers the singularity of his vision to the seventh art, which in him is imagination, play and beauty. Recognised as the precursor of independent cinema in Spain and France, he has developed a career characterised by freedom that began in the late 1960s and has not ceased since. Ado, Adolpho, Adolfo González Arrieta, A. Arrietta has reinvented himself many times but has never stopped filming: with or without a budget, in analogue or digital, in one country or another, with large crews or alone, but always with the tools at his disposal. This is why his cinema is contagious, his desire to create, his joie de vivre, and this is his greatest virtue.
A painter and devoted cinephile, young Ado decides it is time to make his first short films. After filming El crimen de la pirindola (1965) and La imitación del ángel (1966) in Madrid, he moves to Paris in the midst of the May ‘68 revolution. There he meets prominent personalities such as the writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, who praised his work; the now cult director Jean Eustache, for whom he filmed the first sequence of Numéro Zero; and the actor Jean Marais, a regular in the films of the famous Jean Cocteau, with whom he shot Le jouet criminel (1969).
In his first feature film, Le château de Pointilly (1972), the director places Xavier Grandes (an actor present in almost all of his filmography) and the iconic Françoise Lebrun in front of the camera. It is precisely from this work that Duras would say: ‘It had been a long time since cinema had exploded for me in this way’. This was followed by The Intrigues of Sylvia Couski (1974), for which he received the Grand Prix du Festival de Toulon from the hands of his friend, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, as well as Tam Tam (1976), Flammes (1978), Grenouilles (1983) and Kiki (1989), Merlin (1990), Eco y Narciso (2004), Vacanza permanente (2006), Dry Martini (2008) and Belle Dormant (2016), with brilliant performances by Mathieu Amalric and Niels Schneider. All of them are substantially different in their modes of production, yet each possess among their gifts grace, intelligence and originality.
For all these reasons, the Gijón / Xixón International Film Festival is presenting the FICX 2024 Award of Honour to the genuine and incomparable filmmaker Ado Arrieta.
CARLA SIMÓN
COMADRE DE CINE AWARD 2024
Presentation of the award at the Closing Gala
Meeting with the press and the public:
23 nov, 11:30, Escuela de Comercio
Masterclass (+info at Act. Complementarias):
23 nov, 12:30, Escuela de Comercio
Carla Simón has the ability to embrace sorrow with tenderness, to be moving. She achieves this because she possesses the courage of someone who devotes herself to each project, she achieves this because her films are made following the codes of honesty.
In her debut feature, Summer 1993 (2017), the director took the audience’s breath away with the cries of a little girl, an astonishing eight-year-old Laia Artigas, masterfully guided by a then first-time filmmaker.
Aesthetically impeccable, the film is charged with overwhelming sensitivity as Carla Simón tells the story of her own childhood following the death of her mother and demonstrates that art is linked to catharsis.
Shortlisted by the Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to represent Spain at the Oscars, Summer 1993 won, among others, the Best First Film Award at the Berlinale, the Golden Biznaga at the Malaga Festival and the Best New Director Award at the 2017 Goya Awards.
In Alcarràs (2022), her second feature film, Carla Simón once again relives a summer in her childhood, but she does so from a different point in her life and distributing the leading role among the members of a family facing the imminent disappearance of their agrarian tradition. The Catalan director’s own bar seemed insurmountable, and yet with Alcarràs she made history by becoming the first Spanish woman director to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. This recognition was a new incentive for women in the fight for equality in the film industry.
In Carla Simón’s work, letters and diaries as a record of memory carry great weight. Her short films include Correspondencia (2020), in which she shares an epistolary relationship with the Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor, and Carta a mi madre para mi hijo (2022), in which she places herself in front of the camera alongside the great Ángela Molina. In her latest feature, Romería, to be released in 2025, the director pays homage to a generation marked by heroin and AIDS, that of her parents, and tries to reconstruct their story through the letters written by her mother.
The Gijón / Xixón International Film Festival presents the Comadre de Cine Award in collaboration with La Tertulia Feminista les Comadres to a brilliant director who symbolises the achievement of the fair recognition of all those women who manage to make their films through talent and tireless struggle.
LONE FLEMING
SPECIAL MUTANT GENERATION AWARD
Presentation of the award at the Closing Gala
Screening with presentation:
22 nov, 22:30, El ataque de los muertos sin ojos
Lone Fleming’s filmography includes more than forty titles. The Danish actress, who always dreamed of becoming an actress, decided to live in Spain after spending a summer with her mother on the Costa Brava. It was in Madrid where she had her first jobs in fotonovelas and where she started as an extra in films until she became an authentic icon of fantaterror, a fantastic horror genre of independent cinema that was produced in Spain in the 70s.
The first time Lone Fleming took part in a film shoot was in Javier Aguirre’s comedy Pierna creciente, falda menguante (1970), alongside actors such as Fernando Fernán Gómez and Emma Cohen. She would later meet her future husband, the director Eugenio Martín, with whom she made feature films such as the western El hombre del río malo (1971) and the terrifying Una vela para el diablo (1973).
Her career took off when the master of horror from A Coruña, cult director Amando de Ossorio, chose her to star in La noche del terror ciego (1972), in which the actress surprised us with a magnificent performance that won her a great following. She would work again with the director in El ataque de los muertos sin ojos (1973) and in La endemoniada (1975).
Lone Fleming also appeared in comedies such as Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos (1973), directed by Vicente Escrivá and starring José Luis López Vázquez and José Sacristán, in Juan Piquer Simón’s Viaje al centro de la Tierra (1977) and in the television series El juglar y la reina (1978).
In recent years she has produced, written and directed short films. In La virgen descalza (The Barefoot Virgin) (2019), she signs a psychological horror film for which she also did the storyboard, returning to her facet prior to her beginnings in film as a cartoonist.
The Gijón / Xixón International Film Festival of FICX presents the Special Generación Mutante Award to a myth of Spanish cinema, to the amazing Lone Fleming.
