News

Boston-based sales agent 34T has picked up international sales rights to Spanish writer-director Ana Ortiz’s feature debut, psychological thriller “El claro de las luciérnagas” (“Firefly Glades”).

Produced by Sergy Moreno at Madrid’s White Leaf Producciones, the film is structured as a Spanish regional co-production, teaming with Magnética Cine’s María Barroso in Andalusia and Joaquín Calderón at Navarra-based Melitón Films.

“Firefly Glades” figures among the 22 projects selected at Málaga’s 2023 Festival Fund & Co-Production Event (Maff), which runs March 13-16 as part of Málaga Festival’s growing Mafiz industry area.

“Firefly Glades” follows Diana, a school teacher who finds herself lost with her students and a fellow teacher in the middle of a dense forest, after suffering an accident in the bus they were travelling in on their way to a camp.

Looking for a way out, they come across a hunter who offers to help lead them to safety.

Above: The Green YearsPaulo Rocha, the key figure of Portuguese modern cinema, was 28 when he filmed his virtuoso black-and-white debut, The Green Years (1963). It’s a film so mature, with such musical verve and pictorial elegance, we can only marvel at the energy that was in the air in Europe in the 1960s, when the continent’s new waves were taking shape. Rocha’s is a case of maturity arrived at quickly, namely after his cinema studies in Paris, and then his apprenticeships under the masters Manoel de Oliveira and Jean Renoir, as assistant director on Oliveira’s features, The Bread (1959) and Act of Spring and Renoir’s The Elusive Corporal (1962).In The Green Years, two young lovers, a shoemaker, Júlio (Rui Gomes), and a maid, Ilda (Isabel Ruth), are transplants to Lisbon. Though at times nostalgic for their villages, they’re mostly dazzled by the brisk pace, suaveness and...

2. For Paulo Rocha

Weekend 2 - Day 1 - December 13th, 2013

The second Harvard-Gulbenkian program centers around a vitally important yet still under appreciated figure of the post-WW2 Portuguese cinema, the late Paulo Rocha whose influential masterpiece of poetic neo-realism, Mudar de vida (1966) is offered both in tribute to his recent passing and as an occasion to reconsider Rocha's cinema and legacy. Looking beyond the historic "Cinema Novo" movement with which this film and Rocha himself are most closely associated, Mudar de vida is placed here within a broader, alternate context: in dialogue with the films and presence of Víctor Gaviria and Billy Woodberry, two directors inspired, like Rocha, to renew the promise of a truly "popular cinema" intimate with the stories, experiences and landscapes of the people depicted and ultimately empowered by their films. Unseen in Portugal, the films of Gaviria and Woodberry offer revelational compliments to Rocha's lyrical realism, each...