JUNE 21st PROGRAMME:

• The opening gala will be celebrated at 7.00pm at the Teatro Principal of Valencia
• The selection of short films of the section ‘Programants’ is one of the highlights of the day

Cinema Jove kicks off its programming with the presentation of the first competing feature films, US film ‘Thunder Road’ (Jim Cummings, 2018) and Norwegian film ‘Harajuku,’ (Eirik Svensson, 2018).

In ‘Thunder Road’ a police officer tackles a personal crisis after a divorce and the death of his mother. According to its director: “it was important that the main character was a policeman, because it is a lot more difficult for members of this testosterone-driven collective to ask for help, and if they realize they can, than maybe others will as well.”

The film received the Grand Jury Award at the 25th edition of the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) in Austin (Texas, US) and has been highlighted by the English edition of the monthly Esquire magazine as “this year’s funniest, saddest and cheapest indie film.” The 33-year-old director also stars in the film, wrote the script and composed the main song in the soundtrack.

The bittersweet comedy originates from a homonymous 12-minute-long short film that was filmed in a single take. In the credits, the director thanks royals William and Henry, whose grief-stricken images at Lady Di’s funeral served as inspiration. The film will be screened at the Filmoteca at 11.30am and on Tuesday, June 25th at 6.00pm.

Norwegian Harajuku opens with the suicide of the main character’s mother. She is a fifteen-year-old anime and manga fan, with dyed blue hair, that only dreams about leaving dark and cold Oslo behind to live in the city of her dreams, Tokyo. The young otaku evades her pain by evoking anime fantastic stories, dreamlike sequences that the film portrays through animation. About this combination of techniques, the director has commented that: “we decided to include some anime scenes to better portray Vilde’s inner world and her wish to escape reality.”

The film is set on Christmas eve and reflects upon the figure of the absent father. “While I was in the documentation process, I met up with adolescents in Oslo’s city center. Some of them hung out together daily by the train station, and one of the girls was going to meet her father for the first time the same night I met her,” mentioned the director.

Eirik Svensson’s feature film will be screened on June 21st at 6.00pm at the Filmoteca and, in the same location, at 10.30 pm on the 25th of June.

Programants

The Short Film Official Section will kick off at 6.00pm at the Teatro Rialto with the ‘Programants’ selection. A committee consisting of Valencia audiovisual students selected four films of those submitted by international film school students for this special section: ‘Double D’ (Fey Lehiane, 2018 – Utrecht School Of The Arts) ‘Tracing Addai’ (Esther Niemeier, 2018 – Konrad Wolf), ‘La Mugre’ (Pau Bösch, Berta Galvany, Anna Asensio, Lúa López, Sara Ros, 2019 – Universitat Pompeu Fabra), and ‘Sisters’ (Michał Hytroś, 2018 – Lodz Film School).

The competing Official Section will follow, starting at 8.00pm with the screening of program 4 at the Teatro Rialto with: ‘You see the moon’ (Miguel Nunes, 2018), ‘La casa de Julio Iglesias’ (Natalia Marín, 2018), ‘Benidorm 2017’ (Claudia Costafreda, 2019), ‘L’heure de l’ours’ (Agnès Patron, 2019), and out-of competition short film ‘Lo siento, mi amor’ (2018) by Eduardo Casanova.

At 10.30pm the program 3 of the Short Film Official Section will be screened at the same location, including: ‘Kids’ (Michael Frei, 2019), ‘Cocodrilo’ (Jorge Yúdice, 2018), ‘Las fuerzas’ (Paola Buontempo, 2017), ‘La mugre’ (Pau Bösch, Berta Galvany, Anna Asensio, Lúa López, Sara Ros, 2019), ‘En esas tierras’ (Nayra Sanz Fuentes, 2018) and ‘Pauline Asservie’ (Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, 2018).

There will also be a special space for Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, Luna de Valencia Award 2019. At 8.00pm at the Filmoteca the film ‘Our Beloved Month of August’ will be screened.  It premiered at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, where he surprised the critics by blurring the lines between reality and fiction in a summer tale that is, at a time, a love triangle and a playful example of a film inside a film. His participation in this prestigious section opened the door to over 40 festivals, where he received many awards.

And at 10.35pm, the musical comedy with which he jumped into the feature film format in 2004 will be screened, ‘The Face you Deserve’, where he uses traditional fairy tale characters to sarcastically portray the process of maturing into adult life.

The cycle ‘The Gods of Anime’ will take over the Sala 7 of the Rialto Building, which can be accessed through Moratín street. On the first day, you can enjoy masterpieces such as Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’ (1984) and ‘Spirited Away’ (2003), considered by critics as one of the best movies in film history. It received over 14 awards, including the Oscar for Best Animated Film and the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. It became one of the highest grossing anime films in the world.