The Catalan director Isaki Lacuesta is the great winner of the Malaga film festival. Second prize, his work about the legendary Granada band Los Planetas, has won the Biznaga de Oro for the best Spanish film – worth 8,000 euros – and the filmmaker himself has also won the Biznaga de Plata for best direction together with Pol Rodríguez. The work takes a third award, for best editing, awarded to Javier Frutos. Radical, by Christopher Zalla, has won the Biznaga de Oro for the best Ibero-American film, also worth 8,000 euros. The special jury prize went to The little lovesby Sevillian Celia Rico, who portrays a summer between a daughter and her mother, played by Adriana Ozores, who has obtained recognition as best female supporting performance.
During the reading of the winners (interrupted for a few minutes after the fire alarm went off) Juan Antonio Vigar, head of the Malaga competition – which started with controversy after the withdrawal of the film The day is long and dark due to the accusations of sexist violence against its director—has assured that this festival has given “a lot of joy.” “Our festival has managed to be a celebration of life, cinema and joy: you just have to see how the theaters have been filled with audiences,” stressed Vigar, who highlighted the presence of a large number of selected films — up to 246—“because if we want to be useful to the sector, we have to show everything that is done in it.” “Culture is always the last refuge in such a convulsive, tense and aggressive world,” concluded Vigar.
Second prize, which will hit theaters next June, is a film set in the mythical settings of Granada linked to Los Planetas – from the Planta Baja room to the Bora Bora record store or the alleys of Albaicín and Sacromonte – to tell the story the beginnings of the band in the nineties. The project, with a script by Fernando Navarro, started with the idea that Jonás Trueba would direct it, but it finally passed into the hands of Isaki Lacuesta. “The film talks about the legend of The Planets, not about them. We collect fragments of many invented stories, things that have been told in Granada, some are true and others have nothing to do with what happened, also psychedelic fantasies,” Navarro explained to EL PAÍS this week.
For its part, Radical, awarded at the last Sundance Film Festival, is a film based on real events directed by Mexican director Christopher Zalla. It tells the story of Sergio Juárez, a teacher who works in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, where corruption and violence are everyday life. It is also the place where a teacher dares to try a new educational method with his students, with which he obtains surprising results. Zalla himself reported these days that he learned of the teacher's real story through an article sent to him by the actor Eugenio Derbez, who would ultimately be the protagonist. “A teacher can change the world, but we as a society also have to do something because there are deeper problems,” Zalla stressed at a press conference this week. The film, which has been a box office success in both Mexico and the United States, arrives in Spain next Friday, March 15.
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