X Films

Each year, since 2010, Punto de Vista has been inviting three filmmakers to submit a project for a documentary essay film to be shot in Navarra. The X Films Project is named after the Navarra film company founded by Juan Huarte in 1963 with the idea of producing films that “have a unique artistic interest”, in which artists such as Jorge Oteiza, Néstor Basterretxea, Rafael Ruiz Balerdi and José Antonio Sistiaga, to name but a few, took their first steps in the world of filmmaking. Reviving this spirit of sponsorship, the festival aims to offer emerging filmmakers the opportunity to create a new project while, at the same time, bringing new voices from the non-fiction scene to Navarra.

In this edition, Blanca Camell Galí, Hugo Amoedo and Magdalena Orellana have been invited to present their proposals. This year, the jury formed by Anna Manubens, Miquel Martí Freixas and Catarina Boieiro will select one of the projects, which must be produced in the course of 2022 as a personal essay film, with a minimum duration of twenty minutes. The winning film will then be premiered at the next edition of Punto de Vista.

Furthermore, this year features the premiere screening of San Simón 62, by Irati Gorostidi and Mirari Echávarri, the twelfth film to win X Films. Likewise, the audience will get the chance to enjoy a session showing some of the previous works by this year’s candidates, and also to attend the presentation and pitch of their projects in a dynamic, interactive session.

X Films Jury

Anna Manubens is the director of Hangar, an art production and research centre in Barcelona, and teaches at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastian. Before this she was an independent curator and producer with a preference for hybrid roles in the intersection between writing, research, programming, project support, institutional analysis and exhibitions. She was in charge of public programmes at the CAPC contemporary arts centre in Bordeaux, and before this combined her independent work with teaching at the Pompeu Fabra university and regular work with the artist-run Auguste Orts platform in Brussels, devoted to production and exploration of artist’s films. She has worked on films by Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer, Anouk De Clercq, Emily Wardill, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Fiona Tan, Joachim Koester, Dora García, Alex Reynolds y Adrian Schindler, among others. Miquel Martí Freixas. Programmer, cultural manager, teacher and film critic. Specialised in non-fiction cinema. His practice focuses on the construction of audiences and the creation of cultural events that connect with citizens. Programmer in several cultural spaces (Documenta Madrid, États généraux du film documentaire, Filmoteca de Catalunya, and ZINEBI, among others). Member of the team that reopened the Zumzeig Cinema, which received the City of Barcelona Award 2018. He is the co-director of La Inesperada Film Festival. Guest lecturer at ESCAC since 2009, and founder of the online magazine Blogs&Docs, the first publication in Spain dedicated to the analysis of documentary film. Catarina Boieiro is an independent producer, curator and researcher. Her work focuses on the documentary image and contemporary creativity off the dominant film circuits. She works with Stenar Projects, a platform for producing and distributing films by artists like Ana Vaz, Filipa César, Deborah Stratman and Emily Wardill, among others. She staged the exhibition “Résistance Visuelle Généralisée. Livres de photographie et mouvements de libération (Angola, Mozambique, Guinée-Bissau, Cap-Vert”) (2021-2022, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, funded by the Gulbenkian foundation), the result of a process of historical research and curation together with Raquel Schefer. She was editorial coordinator of Doc’s Kingdom – International Seminar on Documentary Film in 2021.

X Films filmmakers

Blanca Camell Galí (1990) studied Audiovisual Communication at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, and was awarded a master’s degree in cinema at the Université Paris 8. She continued her studies at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. Her films explore female desire, working with reality to make it reverberate in fiction. Her shorts L’oreig, Ídols, Tombent les heures and Pol·len have been screened at festivals such as IndieLisboa, Festival de Málaga, Seminci, Cinespaña, D’A Film Festival, Premiers Plans d’Angers and Côté Court.

Selected filmography Pol·len (2019), Tombent les heures (2018), Ídols (2016), L’oreig (2014) Hugo Amoedo. I am a filmmaker and live in Brussels. In my shorts, I have worked fiction, documentary and filmed diary. I have addressed themes such as love, solitude and uncertainty, trying to mix intimate and political aspects, as well as drama and comedy. My current interest is in work, friendship and walking. In my first feature film project, To Redigit, produced by Atelier Graphoui (Belgium), I am going to film two guys working in a studio for large scale digitisation of archives; it will be a film on gestures, ways of looking and some archive images that will shatter the digitisation machines.

Selected filmography Europa (2017), On n’a pas fait l’amour (2014), Camping Wesertal (2013), Robin&Robin (2012) Magdalena Orellana (Buenos Aires, 1990) is a filmmaker and designer living in Madrid. She studied at the Design faculty of the University of Buenos Aires, at ECAM (Madrid), and at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian), where she shot Todo esto es aún más intenso si a esa hora tardía se visita a un amigo para ver cómo le va, premiered at ZINEBI. Her work has been shown at institutions such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Cineteca Madrid and Tabakalera, among others. She is currently working on her first feature film Hasta que el lugar se haga improbable, a project that is supported by the Festival of San Sebastián, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, the Márgenes Festival and Matadero Madrid.

Selected filmography Todo esto es aún más intenso si a esa hora tardía se visita a un amigo para ver cómo le va (2020), A smile is not a paradigm (2018), I’ll wrap my words in paper bags (2018), Sobre la mesa las escaleras (2018), Last Night I Dreamt People Were Playing Football on Ice (2018), Conversaciones (2016)

Session of previous films

Conversaciones

Magdalena Orellana, Spain, 2016, 5 min, DCP, colour, Spanish

Last Night I Dreamt People Were Playing Football on Ice Magdalena Orellana, Spain, 2018, 3 min, DCP, colour, English

Sobre la mesa las escaleras

Magdalena Orellana, Spain, 2018, 5 min, DCP, colour, Spanish

A smile is not a paradigm Magdalena Orellana, USA, 2018, 4 min, DCP, B&W, English

Todo esto es aún más intenso si a esa hora tardía se visita a un amigo para ver cómo le va Magdalena Orellana, Spain, 2020, 8 min, DCP, B&W-colour, Spanish

Europa Hugo Amoedo, Belgium-Spain, 2017, 28 min, DCP, colour, Spanish

Tombent les heures

Blanca Camell Galí, France, 2018, 26 min, DCP, colour, French

X Films 2021 Project

San Simón 62 Irati Gorostidi, Mirari Echávarri

Spain, 2022, DCP, colour, Basque-Spanish World premiere

Image, direct sound, production Irati Gorostidi, Mirari Echávarri / Editing Mirari Echávarri, Irati Gorostidi, Ainara Elgoibar, Usue Arrieta / Selected filmography Mirari Echávarri: San Simón 62 (2022), Cuerpos #1 Santa Águeda (2017), Irati Gorostidi: San Simón 62 (2022), Unicornio (2021), OT-IL (2020), Euritan (2017), Pasaia Bitartean (2016)

In the 80s a monastery in Lizaso (Navarra) housed the eccentric Arco Iris (Rainbow) community. The building’s anodyne walls were decorated with enormous floral motifs and its halls hosted large gatherings to experiment with new age-style cathartic practices. Today the building is home to a closed community of monks and that episode has left almost no traces. The authors of San Simón 62 go there following the testimony of their mothers who, trying to cast off the after-effects of the Franco dictatorship and deal with the personal and political challenges of this new period in Spanish history, spent time in the Arco Iris community.