The president of the Film Academy, Mariano Barroso, today started the applause of those attending the Goya by remembering the deceased Verónica Forqué, Almudena Grandes, Pilar Bardem and Mario Camus, to whom he would be “very similar” if he were a person -he said- the institution that represents Spanish cinema.
In his speech at the 36th edition of the awards, Barroso also congratulated Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Alberto Iglesias and Alberto Mielgo, all of whom were present at the gala, for their Oscar nominations.
And “if Spanish cinema had a face it would be that of a master who is a reference. This companion is José Sacristán, to whom we are going to award the Goya of Honor”, he remarked.
Barroso has wanted to take the opportunity to explain and “summarize” the work of the Academy in defense of a profession that is often precarious and unstable such as that of actors or screenwriters, and for that he has used these recently disappeared figures who were related to cinema, and paid tribute to them.
In this way, he has remembered Forqué, whom he has defined as “an actress who did something that many actors are forced to do: give their joy and light to their characters, and through them to their audience. And keep her pain for her”. “No one ever hid her pain in such a beautiful way,” she added about the actress, who won four goyas.
As Barroso has recalled, a quarter of the academics are actors, and they are the ones with the least paid work, since only one in ten days have a job and they have around 90% unemployment, for which he has claimed for them the same protection that the rest of the workers have.
In this regard, and since “the public system does not cover them”, they created “a kind of parallel social security”, the AISGE Foundation, which attends to actors in need, with pensions that serve to pay the rent, and which was presided over for many years by “another companion very dear to all, Pilar Bardem”, who dedicated herself “to these things apart from making movies”, she said, provoking applause and emotion from her son, Javier Bardem.
Remembering the writer and screenwriter Almudena Grandes has made the president of the Academy emphasize that scripts “are at the origin of everything” and without screenwriters, “there would not be a single movie. None of us would be here today.”
“Precisely the stories that are vying for the Goya for best film today have that in common: they talk about the less obvious part of reality and they have another way of looking at it,” he stressed about Grandes’ way of writing “about the reverse of the life, on the B side, the least known parts of reality, or the least talked about”.
He has told about Mario Camus that, when asked how he managed to direct actors like Paco Rabal, Alfredo Landa, Terele Pávez or Juan Diego, he answered humbly: “I don’t do anything. We don’t need directors. The only thing we All we have to do is go to the shoot to make sure the actors arrive on time.”
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