From 3 to 11 October, Curtocircuíto will open up again a space to reflect on the reality around us through cinema. The festival’s Official Section will show the works of authors from many different countries, with heterogeneous cultures and minds. Articulated into the competitive sections Radar and Explora, we will find a variety of pieces from indispensable filmmakers and new proposals from budding directors who are now making a name for themselves with their most recent work. A total of 35 films from 22 different countries will tinge Curtocircuíto’s halls with creative boldness, diversity and new languages. Simultaneously, these films will be distributed across Spain through Filmin, the festival’s online venue. Additionally, the juries of the competitive sections, made up by professionals from different fields of creation, are being announced today. 

RADAR: narrative cinema at the limits of convention 

As in previous editions, RADAR includes the less conventional proposals of this year’s narrative cinema. This section encompasses simple conceptions like Sergei Loznitsa’s Une nuit à l’Opéra, an observational documentary based on archive images, as well as more ground-breaking projects like the philosophic and digital analysis of How to Disappear, by the Digital Disarmament Movement formed by Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf. This year, different authors who are already old acquaintances of this festival, such as Mark Rappaport, Laura Huertas Millán or Leonardo Moramateus, will accompany us again through a selection of films that seek to reflect on milestones or facts already known, in a search for new facets of reality. There is also room for new discoveries, such as the brilliant, psychedelic night trip of Sun Dog, by a very young Dorian Jespers, or Andrew Norman Wilson’s irreverent In the Air Tonight, focused on the song with the same title by Phil Collins. Magic realism, a digital apocalypse, new identities or oneiric humour, exceptionally spun by both the always unsettling Guy Maddin and the French Marie Losier, are some of the other proposals included in a section whose most outstanding feature is its heterogeneity. 

EXPLORA: a world premiere and many challenges

Opening up new paths and challenging established ideas, there is room for the most propositional cinema at the formal level in EXPLORA. A section in which images and their plasticity always facilitate reflexions on colonialism, as in the case of APIYEMIYEKÎ? by Ana Vaz (PÚLSAR 2016) or Rosa Barba’s Aggregate States of Matters. A number of familiar names in this section, such as Ben Rivers, Michael Fleming, Stefano Canapa or Siegfried Fruhauf, will be present here with proposals that cover a varied range of concepts, from a reflexion on human life through extremely fast frame editing (Tik Tak) to the most unconventional submissions, which seek to show the body of the cinema machine on the screen (Thorax). This section includes notably the world premiere of Untitled by Takashi Makino, who builds a visual mechanism based on a series of automated texts, as well as the work of the Galician director Adrián Canoura, who was sponsored by Curtocircuíto more than five years ago and is now participating in the Official Section for the first time, reflecting in Da morte nace a vida about the foundational piece of Galician cinema: Urxa. 

Curtocircuíto 2020 poster

The graphic image of this edition was developed by the designer Juan Junquera in collaboration with the festival’s art directors. It was inspired by the code of colour gradients typical of thermal cameras. This technology generates a representation of the environment that allows us to identify a number of aspects hidden to our ordinary perception. And that revealing representation contains a poetics, as does every filmmaker’s gaze, that is able to show us reality from its subjectivity.

Curtocircuíto – Santiago de Compostela International Film Festival is organised by the Santiago de Compostela City Council and financed by the Provincial Council of A Coruña and AGADIC, among others.