Noticias Festival
Cinema Jove kicks off its 34th edition with an opening gala at the Teatro Principal
  • The festival will grant the Luna de València award to Portuguese director Miguel Gomes
  • The gala will conclude with the screening of Hungarian feature film ‘Bad Poems’ and the short film ‘16 de diciembre’

The Valencia International Film Festival – Cinema Jove kicks off its 34th edition this Friday in an opening gala that will start at 7.00pm at the Teatro Principal de València and will focus on the concept of the “the festival as a meeting point.”

Cinema Jove will grant its 2019 Luna de València Award to the director Miguel Gomes (1972, Lisbon), spear header of contemporary Portuguese filmmaking. “Gomes is one of the most personal, restless and revolutionary voices of contemporary filmmaking. His presence at the festival adds great quality to the programing, because his films move beyond narrative productions to become works of art,” observes director of Cinema Jove, Carlos Madrid.

During the celebration of the festival a complete cycle on Gomes’ work will be screened at the Filmoteca, including his six feature films up to date and two short films selected by the director himself.

The gala, directed by María José Soler, incorporates live music by Víctor Lucas and Panchi Vivó, who is also the musical director and composer of the gala. The stage design is the work of Luís Crespo.

Actor Alejandro Portaz and actress María Zamora will conduct the event, in which, through their personal sense of humor, they will unveil all of the aspects of this new edition of Cinema Jove. “A dynamic gala that will combine the festival contents with screenings, live music and movement in an original and fresh way” comments MarJosé Soler.

During the gala, the short film ‘16 de diciembre’ will be screened. It received the Movistar Plus short film award in the previous edition of the festival. The film will be presented by its director Álvaro Gago, who won the Best Short Film award at Sundance with his previous short film ‘Matria.’

To conclude the opening gala, the Hungarian feature film ‘Bad Poems’ will also be screened and presented by its director Gábor Reisz. His film debut, ‘For Some Inexplicable Reason’, received the Jury, Audience and Scriptwriting Awards at the Turin Festival and the Best Film Award at the Montecarlo Festival. Four years ago, he started writing the script of this new film which he developed during his residency at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinéfondation.

‘Bad Poems’ is, according to the director, a fictional story, although it is inspired by his reminiscing: “Memory is always fiction: you change the details, you sometimes abandon some things, sometimes glorify others.”

The film narrates the breakup of the main character and his reminiscing to try to understand the present, for which he alternates different film formats: black and white or  granularity: “I think in ‘Bad Poems’ there are two stories: one which takes place in reality and looks like a documentary, and another one that takes place in the head of the main character, Tamás, and is formed by imagination, dreams, memories. I needed contrast and thought it would be more exciting this way.”