Elena López Riera will head the bill on Saturday 11 June at the latest session of Zinemaldia + Plus, the monthly focus run by the San Sebastian Festival on Tabakalera’s shared screen. The Spanish moviemaker will present the three shorts she filmed between 2015 and 2018 prior to her feature debut, El agua (2022), conceived at the Ikusmira Berriak residencies programme and premiered only a couple of weeks ago at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
The director will personally attend the Saturday session to present Pueblo (2015), Las vísceras / The Entrails (2016) and Los que desean / Those Who Desire (2018). After the screening, López Riera will participate in a Q&A on these three shorts already hinting at a filmmaker interested in oral tradition, the voice of women and portraying the rural environment through contemporary cinema.
Doctor in Audiovisual Communication, visual artist and programmer, as well as co-founder of the Lacasinegra collective, Elena López Riera premiered her first short, Pueblo, at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight before taking it to some twenty international festivals. Her following two works, Las vísceras / The Entrails and Los que desean / Those Who Desire, premiered at the Locarno Festival, where the latter carried off the Golden Leopard for Best Swiss Short Film. Los que desean went on to garner further accolades, including a special mention in San Sebastian Festival’s Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section.
Her shorts have also featured in retrospectives running at the Cinématèque française (Paris), the Cinemateca de Bogotá (Colombia), UnionDocs (USA) and the Gijón International Film Festival (Spain).
In 2018, the director was selected to participate with her project El agua in Ikusmira Berriak, the residencies programme jointly organised by the San Sebastian Festival, Tabakalera-International Centre for Contemporary Culture and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE). That same year, the director also bagged the Ikusmira Berriak REC Grabaketa Estudioa post-production Award at the San Sebastian Festival. Prior to its recent premiere at the Directors’ Fortnight, López Riera had worked on developing El agua at other residencies including the Festival de Cannes Cinéfondation, where she won the CNC best project award.
Apart from teaching cinema at the Haute École d’Art et Design (HEAD) in Geneva, Elena López Riera teaches at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastian and at other centres.
The Spanish moviemaker will visit Tabakalera weeks after the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight premiere of her first feature, ‘El agua’, conceived at Ikusmira Berriak