11th Independent Film Festival of Barcelona
L’Alternativa 2004
12th - 20th November 2004

The Independent Film Festival of Barcelona, L’Alternativa, has reached its eleventh edition. It has continued to grow, mature and create a personality for itself, whilst simultaneously making friends all over the world. The challenge now is to build on these strong roots amongst a loyal public (over 30,000 people came to L’Alternativa in 2002 and 2003), the professional sector and the international independent-filmmaking network.

L’Alternativa’s goal has not changed. Its aim is to promote innovative, personal and committed filmmaking - a vital resource for educating us ethically and aesthetically, revealing new ways of looking at the world, opening our eyes and stirring our emotions.

Barcelona will host the 11th Independent Film Festival of Barcelona between 12th and 20th November 2004 in seven venues: the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), Renoir Floridablanca cinema, FNAC-Triangle, the French Institute, the Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) headquarters, the Readers’ Club auditorium and the Catalan Institute for Latin American Cooperation (ICCI).

Some 70 innovative, creative and critical films from around 35 countries from across the world will compete in the four Official Sections (Short Films, Feature Films, Documentaries and Animation). Most of these films have not been screened before in Spain.

The non-competitive Parallel Sections this year are:

· Robert Bresson: Revealing the Invisible

A section dedicated to exploring the filmmaking philosophy of a director whose films centre on the questions that concern him as a director. Bresson uses fragmentation to discover the world behind what is visible.

· Synergies of History. Don Askarian: Magical Realism

A selection of films by the director considered by some to be the only true Armenian filmmaker. Numerous critics have described his work as ‘magical realism’. Don Askarian will be at the Festival in person.

· German Documentaries: Hybrid Forms

In the 1980s, documentary-making in the West suffered a crisis by questioning for the first time its purely objective informative purpose. The idea arose of stressing subjectivity, combining documentary and fictional resources and experimenting with semi-documentaries and reports. A series of documentaries made by young German filmmakers in the 1990s reveal these new trends.

· Film Schools of the World

This parallel section has become a classic kaleidoscope of international filmmaking and a weathervane of new trends. A total of 63 films from young filmmakers at 32 film schools from across the world will be screened.

· Independent Dutch Filmmaking: Past and Present

An historical look at independent Dutch filmmaking, examining the different cinematic movements in the Netherlands in recent decades.

· Homage to Alain Tanner

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Alain Tanner was a key figure in developing and popularising ‘New Swiss Cinema’. Influenced by the British ‘Free Cinema’ and the nouvelle vague, his films tell the lives of rebels and outsiders in Genoa and combine the documentary style of cinéma vérité with narrated fable-like tales.

· Visions from the South: Fernando Birri

Fernando Birri directed Tire dié, a revolutionary film considered as the central plank of the New Latin American Filmmaking Movement. Birri defined the movement as ‘popular, nationalistic, realistic and critical filmmaking that seeks to interpret, express and communicate with the people’. Years later, together with García Márquez, Julio García Espinosa and other filmmakers, Birri set up the International Film and Television School in San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba.

The Parallel Activities this year are:

· Soundtrack Workshop: Listening to Films

Once again, Conrado Xalabarder will concentrate on the theoretical/analytical side; the practical/technical side will be covered by Edesio Alejandro, composer of soundtracks of films such as Suite Habana.

· Roundtable: Identity and Exile

Don Askarian and Llorenç Soler will discuss exile, identity and their experience as filmmakers.

· L’Alternativa will also offer the popular and free-of-charge Hall Screen sessions in the CCCB Hall between 13th and 19th November. These nightly four-hour multidisciplinary sessions contain a wide range of works including mini-monographs devoted to contemporary filmmakers, material obtained through the Independent Film Network (IFN), work from local, national and international groups and associations and selections from other film festivals. Several sessions will be given over to the Open Screen, a space that gives amateur filmmakers the chance to see their work projected exactly as they produced it.