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Ulrich Seidl, Bertrand Mandico and Jessica Sarah Rinland, first names at Curtocircuíto 2018

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We announce today the first distinguished guests of our 15th edition, who will be visiting the city on 29 septiembre and on 7 October. They are the filmmakers Ulrich Seidl and Bertrand Mandico, to whom their respective retrospectives will be dedicated, and Jessica Sarah Rinland, who will play the leading role in the Púlsar section.

Photography: Sepp Dreissinger

Today we announce the first distinguished guests of our 15th edition, who will be visiting the city on 29 September and on 7 October. They are the filmmakers Ulrich Seidl and Bertrand Mandico, to whom their respective retrospectives will be dedicated, and Jessica Sarah Rinland, who will play the leading role in the Púlsar section.

Ulrich Seidl (Vienna, 1952) is one of the big names in independent films in recent decades. The Austrian filmmaker began his career in 1980 with the film One Forty and continued with award-winning films such as Good News (1990), about newspaper vendors in Vienna; Animal  Love (1995), about the intense relationship of different people with their pets; and Models (1998), which delves into the private lives of three models. In these early works, the portrait of the hypocrisy of Western social conventions that characterises his work already emmerges. The consecration came with Hundstage (Dog Days), which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2001. Since then, films such as Import  Export (2007), the successful trilogy Paradise (2012) and Safari (2016) have been screened in the official sections at the Cannes, Berlinale and Venice Film Festivals and won multiple awards where his polemic films premiered, taking the lead because of his approach to themes  such as sex tourism, Christian faith or hunting. By the same token, the filmmaker's works successfully won awards at film festivals such as Gijón, Seville and Karlovy Vary.

The cinematographic style of Seidl is characterised by the blend of documentary and fiction methods. “I make movies. Sometimes fiction films with documentary elements, and sometimes documentaries with fictional elements. Only movies”. The filmmaker takes a stand with the people whom he films, in which he refuses to judge them, between the realistic and the artificial, so that he puts the audience and his morals in question. These characteristics have turned him into a leading figure in recent cinema, praised by directors such as Werner Herzog and John Waters, who considered him to be Fassbinder's heir.

According to Pela del Álamo, the Festival’s Artistic Director, “Ulrich Seidl is one of the maestros of contemporary cinema, not only for his virtuous search for the limits between reality and fiction, but also for his ability to generate an empathy that redeems the characters of the grotesque, leaving space for viewers to feel and connect with them based on our own life experiences”.

The transgressive will of Seidl is shared by French Director Bertrand Mandico (Toulouse, 1971), unique for his chromatic bizarreness, an eclectic style with the ability to create universes from an overflowing visual imagination, merging and disintegrating the genres both in the narrative and sexual sense. “I find myself in a very queer context, which I also associate with a kind of underground, avant-garde destiny, which is not based on the sexual norm and is more in the field of research, we could say, or having an open mind”. After studying animation in Gobelins, Mandico wrote and directed numerous films in which he virtuously uses all kinds of artistic techniques (photography, collage, drawings, etc.). These include, among others, Our Lady of Hormones (2015), Prehistoric Cabaret (2014) and the feature film The Wild Boys (2017), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Currently the filmmaker is working on a project of 21 films in 21 years with Elina Löwensohn, a reflection on the physical state of the actress and fiction. The film at Curtocircuíto, whose title will be Une rétrospective a Bertrand Mandico avec son actrice fétiche Elina Löwensohn (A Retrospective of Films by Bertrand Mandico with his fetish actress Elina Löwensohn) will be the first retrospective that is dedicated to him in Spain.

It will be our section Púlsar, which in each edition showcases the work of emerging filmmakers, and also for the first time in Spain, that puts the spotlight on the work of Jessica Sarah Rinland, one of the promising, fresh filmmakers in experimental cinema. Taking the seventh art as the core concept, her work, as in the case of Mandico, is characterised by dialogue with disciplines such as photography.

The Argentine-British filmmaker exhibited her work in galleries, film festivals and universities, such as the New York Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Currently, she is an associate artist at Somerset House Studios and received a scholarship to the Film Study Center at Harvard University.

On this 15th anniversary,we will continue evolving from short films to interdisciplinary contents, delving into the fusion between different arts. Above and beyond cinema, Curtocircuito will carry out a well-rounded programme, by continuing with ‘Around Sound’, in which there will also be a place for music and thought with screenings, training activities and various performances that will take place in different locations in the city.

 

First all-inclusive season tickets at a special discounted price

Until this Friday 31 August, all-inclusive season tickets can be purchased through Entradas Abanca for the 15th Edition of Curtocircuíto. These season tickets, available at a special discounted price of €20, will give access to all of the Festival’s screenings and concerts, which will be held from 29 September to 7 October. Whoever purchases their season tickets now can pick them up at the Teatro Principal box office in Santiago de Compostela starting on 24 September.

As of 1 September, it will also be possible to purchase all-inclusive season tickets at a price of €30 and tickets for screenings and concerts separately, at a price of €18 each, which is why this initial offer is perfect for spectators who want to fully enjoy Curtocircuíto.

 

[Curtocircuíto is organized by the Concello de Santiago, funded by the A Coruña Provincial Council and has the collaboration of the AGADIC]