This year’s crop of new Spanish films is exceptionally strong… We started out with plans to show four films, but the quality was such, we’ve ended up with 13 (and one classic, The Executioner, often described as “the greatest Spanish film ever made”).
The selection includes multiple Goya (Spanish Oscar) winners, including El 47 (Best Film), Saturn Return (Best Director), The Blue Star (Best New Director), The Flamenco Guitar of Yerai Cortés (Best Documentary) and Black Butterflies (Best Animation), as well as award-winners from many festivals and acclaimed new works from such established auteurs as Julio Medem (8), Albert Serra (Afternoons of Solitude) and Alejandro Amenábar (The Captive). All of these films, barring The Executioner, are Vancouver premieres.
Join us for a tapas buffet and wine-tasting January 9 or a live flamenco show, January 11.
Get an all-access pass or 3-ticket pack:
*Pass includes the Opening Gala event and VIFF Live
**Ticket pack excludes the Opening Gala event and VIFF Live
The Blue Star
In crisis, a popular singer quits Spain to backpack in Argentina. There he comes under the spell of a veteran musician, who teaches him the art of chacareras, zambas and vidalas. It's a journey of musical kinship and spiritual reawakening.
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Sleepless City
The first dramatic feature by documentary filmmaker Guillermo Galoe, this is a scintillating slice of contemporary neo-realism set among the gitano community in southern Europe's largest shanty town, La Cañada Real.
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The Captive
Join us for tapas, wine, and the West Coast premiere of a sweeping historical epic about the young Miguel de Cervantes, held for ransom in Algiers in 1575 and hitting on his gift for storytelling as a survival tactic.
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Forastera
In this mysterious and subtle coming of age drama, teenager Cata is soaking up the sun, smoking furtive cigarettes, and enjoying a summer break with her grandparents and her younger sis in Mallorca. That is, until Cata's beloved abuela collapses...
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El 47
Winner of five Goya Awards including for Best Film, this is the true story of a frustrated bus driver who hijacks his own bus to draw attention to the neglected shantytown on the outskirts of Barcelona where he made his home in the 1950s.
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Afternoons of Solitude
Pacification director Albert Serra turns his unflinching gaze on the subject of bullfighting, and in particular the famous young matador Andrés Roca Rey. The film challenges us to look its subject square in the eye and draw our own conclusions.
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Maspalomas
Vincente came out of the closet late in life. But elects to go back in it when he's sent to a nursing home. Under the influence of his gregarious roommate, he starts to regain some of his old spark...
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The Executioner
Regularly cited as the greatest Spanish film ever made, Berlanga's masterpiece is a pitch black comedy about an undertaker lined up by the state executioner to marry his beautiful daughter -- but he'll also have to inherit the old man's job.
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The Flamenco Guitar of Yerai Cortés + Por Derecho (For the Right) Live
Winner of the Goya Award for Best Documentary, this is an exquisite and surprisingly intimate portrait of the brilliant young guitarist Yerai Cortés, preceded by an hour of passionate flamenco music, song and dance performed by Flamenco Rosario.
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Saturn Return
This fascinating, highly acclaimed movie is a thinly disguised history of 90s indie rockers Los Planetas, a Granada grunge outfit who cited the Velvet Underground as inspiration. It's one of the best rock movies in years.
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Salve Maria
Laura Weissmahr won the Goya award for Best New Actress for her portrait of Maria in Mar Coll's third feature film, a tense and compelling drama on taboo emotions.
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Black Butterflies
This Goya-winning animated feature is based on the filmmaker's previous documentary, Climate Exodus, following the stories of three women forced into exile by climate change.
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8
The always stylish, idiosyncratic Basque auteur Julio Medem is back with one of his most ambitious films (and our closing night gala), a sweeping historical romance in eight chapters, spanning eight decades in Spanish history from the 1930s to the present day.
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