THE FESTIVAL OF MY LIFE I am almost certain that I went to the first festival events. I may not have been the first one into the cinema, but I was definitely there for the first days of screenings. It has been 60 years since then and we can assume that I was quite young at the time - but not too young to understand what I was seeing. To understand and for an impression to be made on me. It was an unforgettable experience. Or rather, it was the start of an unforgettable experience that would last many more years. I am afraid that not many of you reading this will remember what this city was like at that time. The cultural desert, in the broadest and deepest sense of the concept, that this city was-and all cities were-in the 1950s. It is not just that there were no activities to counteract the imposed, official cultural desert. There was simply nothing. We didn’t hear about anything that was actually happening, that might be happening or that many wished would happen. The purpose of the media was to transmit solely the peace and the harmony that we all lived in. Romantic novels and historical essays on the virtues of Spain in the bookshops. There were practically no galleries of contemporary art (we didn’t even know what contemporary art was). At the cinema, the few Spanish films there were told us stories of rural dramas and war victories. Only an occasional quality American film. And that was it. No cinema or theatre or exhibitions or books or anything. Neither inside or out. The world outside this provincial city… didn’t exist. Wrong: it existed but was not seen. A desert surrounded by a wall. But things did happen. There was injustice, misery, extreme inequality, repression of liberties: there were wonderful people with different stories. But we knew nothing about all of this because we weren’t told. It was buried in uniformity and in perpetual peace (parenthesis: I remember that Bergman’s The Seventh Seal escaped censorship - I saw it six times in a row). And then, suddenly, we had the festival. Foreign films; feature films on activities and movements and social conflicts; analyses of other historic political figures; documentaries about cities or regions that did more than just show photographs of cathedrals; wonderful animated short films that had nothing do with Bambi and the like; extraordinary documentaries by Spanish filmmakers - and even films that showed girls in bikinis. They might not have been amazing cinematographic productions (although some were). But we were simply excited about seeing another reality. A different perspective of the world. Another world. We went there to enjoy ourselves. We went there - those of us were on her way to becoming… oddballs. I also knew a bit about the films that were going to be screened because my father was one of the festival organizers. My father, Pedro Ibarra Mac-Mahón, was the chairman of the Basque Institute of Hispanic Culture, which started the festival. One of the reasons for putting it in place was probably to disseminate Spanish culture in Latin America (a reason which didn’t have a very broad scope, in any case). They probably also thought that the population needed some culture, especially the ruling elite. I might now add that my father was very much in favour of extending the boundaries of culture and that he was a “liberal” man. Therefore, regardless of other considerations, I do believe that his primary objective was to promote an awareness of other realities and extend culture without restriction. So, I am going to take advantage of this space to say that it was one of the best things he ever did. It is true that the festival was a social event, but it was also a meeting of oddballs, of everyone who didn’t like-of all of us who didn’t like-what was happening and, above all, what we couldn’t see was happening, although we weren’t at all sure about what did have to happen. I believe that the festival helped many of us to change our way of seeing things, taught us that there was a world beyond and that it was possible to view reality-and people-in a very different way. The truth is that-for better or for worse-the festival definitely made us oddballs… and changed our lives forever. Pedro Ibarra Güell
FIRST SPECTATOR / LEHENENGO IKUSLEA / PRIMER ESPECTADOR
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