LPA International Film Festival

Interview with Luis Miranda, director of the Festival

A gorilla has escaped and wanders around the city of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria. this king Kong is not in Sumatra, like the one belonging to Merian C. Cooper, but he is also on an island and for ten days he will make it his own, he’ll look for you, he’ll take you out from your house so you can go to the cinema and he’ll invite you to look, to see, to maybe become his sight. Hand in hand with this ape, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival (website) suggests us different points of view, it invites us, as Dziga Vertov would say, to free ourselves, with its mechanical eye as our mean, to free ourselves from the ropes of time and space: “I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you the world the way only I can see it”.

For a ten days we’ll be able to enjoy, or as we would say here, “squeeze the juice out” of those different ways of perceiving the reality-fiction, with titles our eyes wouldn’t have hardly had any access to if it wasn’t for events like this. It’ll be ten whole days, 4th to 13th of March, when the masks from the carnival, still warm on the nightstand, call our attention again. Because it is only two hours, and hour and a half or thirty five minutes when you walk into that dark room, get comfortable on your seat and get exposed to be looked at by an idea and to look at it through your own prism, to choose the character or object you want to become for that period of time where precisely those coordinates disappear as a result of the director’s whimsical language.

The official section of the festival, the “golden boy of the festival” according to one of the programmer, Victor Rosales, is formed by 12 films and 14 short films; a window of the contemporary audiovisual narrative, where the classic paradigm of “exposition, climax, denouement” it is not necessarily the base to communicate, to explore in search of new relationships between author and audience.

This showing, as its director Luis Miranda tells us, tries to place the Canary Islands into the world through the cinema, get the citizens involved, wake up the interest for the seventh art and its last tendencies with the goal of producing synergies that will change the pulse of the cultural walk on the city of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria.

A look over the sections with Victor Rosales, programmer of the Festival