In this section, which in 2024 will have its own section outside of Esbilla, FICX offers a carefully chosen selection in which the classic genres are approached from unique and wildly heterodox artistic points of view.
Four feature films will have their state premiere at Generación Mutante: Laguna Mental by Cristóbal Arteaga (international premiere), Real by Adele Tulli, Paying For It by Sook-Yin Lee and Boreal by Pelayo Muñiz Cabal (world premiere).
Laguna mental (Chile, Spain) is the latest film by Cristóbal Arteaga, a Chilean filmmaker based in Madrid who passed through FICX in 2019 with As mortes. After passing through SanFic, the director now presents at FICX the international premiere of this hilarious meta-cinematic comedy, in which an actor in a chroma key suit wanders around a Chilean village trying to locate the rest of the film crew.
Laguna mental by Cristóbal Arteaga
Italian filmmaker Adele Tulli reflects in Real (Italy, France), a film that premiered worldwide at Locarno, on the human experience in the digital age, where the distinction between the real and the virtual is increasingly fragile. She does so through a multiplicity of images of heterogeneous natures, ranging from those recorded with surveillance cameras to those generated with Artificial Intelligence.
Real by Adele Tulli
With Paying For It (Canada), director Sook-Yin Lee adapts Chester Brown’s graphic work of the same name from a feminist and autobiographical perspective. In the film, which premiered in Toronto and was executive produced by John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), a cartoonist begins to resort to prostitution when his girlfriend decides to redefine their relationship.
Paying For It by Sook-Yin Lee
Boreal (Spain) is the feature debut of Gijón-born director Pelayo Muñiz Cabal, who won the 2005 FICX Young Directors Award with his short film project Sístole/Diástole. In the film, which will have its world premiere at FICX, four friends get together in a rural house where the atmosphere becomes strained at times.
A representative of the new queer French cinema with double recognition at the Locarno Festival for his short film Les démons de Dorothy, Alexis Langlois makes his feature debut with Las reinas del drama (France, Belgium). In it, he focuses on the lesbian love affair between two opposing singers who meet in a television competition. The film, which features Asia Argento and Alma Jodorowsky in the cast, arrives in Gijón after its screening at the Cannes Critics’ Week and the Atlántida Festival in Mallorca and is presented in collaboration with XEGA (Association of LGTBI+ people of Asturias).
Las reinas del drama by Alexis Langlois
La Parra (Spain) is the third feature film by Galician filmmaker Alberto Gracia, winner of the FIPRESCI Award at the Rotterdam Festival 2013 with his debut feature, El quinto evangelio de Gaspar Hauser (The Fifth Gospel of Gaspar Hauser). On this occasion, the director tells the story of a man who, after returning to his native Ferrol, is mistaken for a missing guide. The film, which won an award at SEMINCI, had its world premiere in Rotterdam and features photography by Ion de Sosa and music by Jonay Armas.
La Parra by Alberto Gracia
Irish director Aislinn Clarke’s second feature is the first horror film in Gaelic. Fréwaka (Ireland) is a disturbing folk horror story in which a woman moves to an isolated village to take care of another woman. The film comes to FICX’s Mutant Generation after being presented out of competition at the Locarno Festival and in the Official Selection at Sitges, where it won the Award for Best Soundtrack.
Three short films will also be screened in the Mutant Generation Section at FICX: the international premiere of Stairs (Luxembourg) by filmmaker Raha Raz Ghashghai, in which a director faces her first day of shooting; the Spanish premiere of La noche del Minotauro (Colombia) by Juliana Zuluaga Montoya, which offers a fantastic story built with archive images; and Planetagatik (Spain) by Eneko Muruzabal Elezcano, in which a scientist questions the environmental policies adopted by his company.
The Mutant Generation section will also host the 14th Anniversary Special Screening of the feature film Campamento Flipy (Spain), the comedy (now a cult movie) by Rafa Parbus shot in Asturias and starring Flipy, Carlos Areces, Eloi Yebra, Pablo Carbonell, Marta Belmonte, Ernesto Sevilla, Raúl Cimas, Ignatius Farray, Rosario Pardo and Pedro Reyes. And the Festival will also be hosting a special screening of El ataque de los muertos sin ojos (Spain), a film written and directed by the master of horror cinema Amando de Ossorio in 1973, starring Tony Kendall, Fernando Sancho, Esperanza Roy, Frank Braña and Lone Fleming.
