Gijón International Film Festival (FICX) — Official Selection DOCUFICX, 2015
Gijón International Film Festival (FICX) — 2015
Little Spain: A Century of History was part of the Official Selection DOCUFICX of the Gijón International Film Festival in 2015, a FIAPF specialized cinematic competition, and screened in several theatres across Asturias.
The festival
The Gijón International Film Festival has run in the Asturian port city since 1963, which makes it one of the oldest film festivals in Spain. It began as a children’s film and television competition and grew into something quite different: by the time Little Spain screened there, Gijón had spent decades building a reputation as the Spanish festival for independent and auteur cinema, a programme of first and second features and of directors who would not be shown anywhere else in the country. It is often described as Spain’s Sundance. Its international short film competition qualifies for both the Academy Awards and the Goyas, and the festival holds FIAPF accreditation as a specialized competitive event.
DOCUFICX is the festival’s documentary strand. Selection into it is a jury decision taken from an international field, not an open screening slot, and for a first film it is the kind of selection that decides whether a documentary is seen outside the country it was made in.
Why Asturias
There was a particular logic to this film playing in that part of Spain. The Spanish quarter of Manhattan was never evenly Spanish. From the end of the nineteenth century the majority of its residents were Galicians and Asturians — as El País put it in 2014, “a finales del siglo XIX, gallegos y asturianos se convirtieron en los vecinos mayoritarios del barrio”. The shops and restaurants of 14th Street carried the names of the places those families had left: Restaurante La Coruña, Bar Coruña, Casa Moneo.
So when the film screened in theatres across Asturias in 2015, it was showing a lost New York neighbourhood to the region that had helped populate it. The Galician press made the same connection repeatedly — La Opinión A Coruña came back to the film three times in four years, each time following the Galician thread through it.
The same year
2015 was the year the film travelled. In January ABC carried it on its opinion pages and United Press International reviewed it in New York; in February it won the Latin ACE Award of the Association of Latin Entertainment Critics of New York for Best Documentary; in July the critic Donald Kuspit published the review that called it “a kind of masterpiece”; and in the autumn it was in the official selection at Gijón.
Related
- The Latin ACE Award, 2015
- La Opinión A Coruña — “Un Coruña en el viejo Nueva York”
- Galicians in New York
- The history of Little Spain, Manhattan
- La Nacional — the Spanish Benevolent Society, 1868–2000
- All press coverage