The 17th FICM will screen a program dedicated to the Spanish exile and Luis Buñuel

 

-PRESS RELEASE-

 

Morelia, Michoacán, September 5, 2019.

 

The 17th FICM will screen a program dedicated to

the Spanish exile and Luis Buñuel

 

The 17th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), with the invaluable support of Fundación Televisa, the Cineteca Nacional, the UNAM Film Library and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project de L’Immagine Ritrovata, will screen a program dedicated to the Spanish exiles who arrived in Mexico after fleeing the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship; and to Luis Buñuel, one of the most prominent filmmakers of the Spanish exile in Mexico who naturalized Mexican, after being welcomed by the national film industry in 1946.

This program commemorates 80 years of the arrival of the Sinaia vessel at the port of Veracruz, which on June 13, 1939 transported about 1,600 Spanish people seeking refuge in Mexico.

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Batel, vice president of the FICM writes: “The women and men aboard the exile ships that arrived in Mexico were given protection so that they could remain free, Spanish, and republicans. Furthermore, they were offered a new homeland, and the republican Spanish exiles responded to that gesture in the best possible way: with love and labor for this country.”

The films which make up the program that will look at the Spanish exile are Un exilio: película familiar (2017), a documentary by Juan Francisco Urrusti, a Mexican filmmaker whose family arrived in this country after fleeing the war in Spain; and En el balcón vacío (1961) by Jomi García Ascot, son of a republican Spanish diplomat who in 1939 migrated to Mexico with his family.

The program also includes three films by Luis Buñuel, who left Spain in 1936 and settled in Mexico a decade later after living in Paris and the United States. These films are Los olvidados (1950), Ensayo de un crimen (1955) and Nazarín (1958).

“Perhaps by solely mentioning Luis Buñuel (who, incidentally, wrote much of his work in Michoacán) we would already be joining this commemoration without any further explanation, but this would be unfair to so many others; we would be overlooking the outcome of that story which began as a tragedy and ended up being a vast torrent of knowledge that is still growing today,” adds Cárdenas Batel.

 

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