The director of Valladolid International Film Week, Javier Angulo, made an “excellent balance” of the 67th edition today at Ical, which tonight drops the curtain after eight days with 275 films. “It was the best edition since I arrived in every sense. The films in the sections have never been so popular in general. We have recovered viewers and improved the numbers of 2019, which had marked a roof. The city replied, I saw the theaters full and this fills me with pride, I think there was a hunger for cinema and that we gave the fans what they expected, a good level of cinema, as the critics, the juries and the general public have said “, he has declared.
Furthermore, at the end of the reading of the winners (which he defined as “rounds”, since he received “neither a kick, nor a whistle”), he specified that in response to the recurring question of which country he will be invited to the next edition, he specified that “provisionally would be Canada”. This country was the protagonist of Seminci as early as 1993, when a monograph and a large retrospective of 25 feature films entitled ‘Canada, a different cinema’ was dedicated to it, which included films by Guy Maddin, Denys Arcand or Léa Pool, including many others.
When asked about this decision, Angulo stressed his interest in “getting a little bit of the pulse of Canadian cinema”, which he believes is “a bit overshadowed by North American cinema when it has practically nothing to do with it, it’s another cinema with a different personality. ” “We have been in contact with them a couple of times to make Canada a host country again and I hope we can take it back,” he stressed.
For him this year it was “nice” to experience the reunion of the little ones with the theaters after two years without being able to program sections such as Miniminci or Seminci Joven. “People must know that most of these children have never entered a cinema, and when they do they have hallucinations, because the sound, the image … They have never seen anything like that. Cinema is still one. total show, “he summed up.
Regarding the closing of the edition, the director explained that this year, in addition to drivers and hostesses, about 250 people worked on the festival, 3,600 films were seen to select the 275 chosen and about 1,400 guests were received, who they enjoyed 350 film sessions. “In the absence of closing data for today and tomorrow, we believe we can equal the record figure of 2019, with about 98 thousand viewers. Perhaps we will exceed it”, he explained, also noting that at the moment they have not received the data on viewers of the films either. of the festival included in the Filmin platform. The director starred in the winner’s reading anecdote by revealing, in advance when he wanted to announce the reruns tomorrow, Sunday, the name of the winner of the best director award (Jerzy Skolimovski for ‘EO’).
