Thoughts on this Year's Goya Awards

A new mode of writing known as noir fiction emerged in the US during the great depression. Perhaps as a child of the movement, film noir elevated Bogart and his Maltese Falcon to the height of the film genre.

The Spanish film La isla mínima (English title: Marshland) won just about every award possible at the Goya Awards ceremony held a few weeks ago, earning enough statuettes of the old Spanish painter to fill a showcase.

Film fanatics like me who are not fortunate enough to reside in Madrid or Barcelona have a tough time staying on top of the Spanish film industry. Many of the movies nominated for awards from the Spanish film academy are hard to find among those shown at movie theaters “de provincias”. Just an example: two of the five titles nominated for best picture, Loreak (Flowers) and Magical girl, were not screened outside large capital cities.

Usually, American mega-productions with incredible promotional campaigns dominate our screens, and that’s logical. Film is a business, even though sometimes it seems we forget that it’s also an art and a part of culture. (Is it not known by some as the seventh art?)

One critic recently wrote “Last year was a year in which viewers got reacquainted with Spanish film”. That’s partially true. What Spanish movies have attracted big audiences? Barely three: Ocho apellidos vascos (Spanish Affair), El Niño (The Kid), and La isla minima. So what do these three offerings have in common? The first is a romantic comedy that has a little fun with regional Spanish stereotypes, the second is an action film that offers a hard look at drug trafficking on both sides of the strait of Gibraltar, and the third is a story that takes place during Spain’s delicate 1970’s transition period which saw the country move from a dictatorship to a democracy. These all seem like very different movies, but there is one thing they have in common: the barrage of publicity promoting them that pummeled possible viewers over several weeks and that made it nearly impossible not to go to the theatre to watch them.

La isla minima is a great movie with beautiful cinematography, a nicely crafted story, and actors like Javier Gutiérrez, the very worthy winner of the Goya Award for leading actor who was stuck playing a nearly comical TV series character before being able to prove the quality of his acting skills with this fantastic film. We’ve already talked about Ocho apellidos vascos, and I had great fun watching it, but I got the feeling that the main character, the wonderful comedian Dani Rovira, was just playing the role of himself –I’m not sure if he really deserved the award for best new actor. Relatos salvajes is a dizzying blend of stories that its director, with the unpronounceable last name (Damian Szifron), masterfully orchestrates. El niño is an excellent action movie on the same level as those that arrive to Spain from Hollywood.

Spanish film proved last year that it can produce works that attract big audiences, but there’s still something of a void here in terms of Latin American films. We’ll have to wait until the Huelva Film Festival to see something from the other side of the pond, and that’s disappointing.

To all Spanish teachers who always –or at least who frequently- use film as authentic material for our classes, and who enjoy the rich variety of accents and expression that Spanish language film offers to all of us, we would love it here in Spain, where we’re discovering that the business of teaching Spanish to foreigners makes up a sizable portion of the GDP, if something more cultural could be promoted with the distribution of lesser-known titles that don’t have the support of huge promotional budgets. Fortunately film-viewing websites (legal ones of course) are starting to function better, which means high quality reproduction and fair payment to the creators at a reasonable price is possible for those wanting to watching less commercialized Spanish films.