The Seville city council backtracks and announces that the capital will host the 20th edition of the European Film Festival at the end of November. If last week it was announced that the film festival would be postponed to spring 2024 so as not to coincide with the Latin Grammys, which will take place in the middle of the month, now the council is once again moving this event for movie lovers on the calendar .
“It will be a special edition,” warned the mayor of the Seville capital, José Luis Sanz, at a press conference after meeting with representatives of the sector, who pointed out that it was “impossible” to organize a “normal” event since it was not He came to meet the deadlines in terms of “tenders and administrative processes.”
The turnaround has been celebrated by all. Marta Velasco, president of the Andalusian Film Academy, has been “satisfied because the Festival is being held, one of the essential events for the industry, in the autumn festival calendar”, while José Alba, president of The Andalusian Association of Fiction, Documentary, Animation and Serial Film Producers (ANCINE), has wanted to highlight “the rapid reaction” on the part of the municipal government to meet with them in the month of August in order to find the best solution possible given the conflict that had been generated by the postponement of the event.
“The change of dates seems great to us”, he declares to this newspaper, “we have reached an agreement in 20 minutes. It has been something simple”, he explains, “all very organic and very normal”. “The special edition (which has not yet been configured), knowing the director of the Festival, will be very careful, more selective and with less volume in terms of films”, he informs.
In the meeting held between the town hall and the sector held this Tuesday, where representatives of the Andalusian Film Academy, ANCINE, the Andalusian Association of Women in the Audiovisual Media (AAMMA) and the Association of Audiovisual Distribution Companies of Andalusia and Cines de Andalucía (AEDAVA), it was concluded that November is the best date to celebrate this event in 2023, as well as the local government corroborated that from 2024 it would be held again on its usual date.
“At the round table we have listened to the motivations of the city council for which they had decided to postpone it, which are totally logical, but the important thing is that they have made it clear that they support the Festival 100%,” insists Alba, “they want to renew it, give it fresh air and make it a little more open to the city. That this year did not give time to do it, but the effort and will that they have put in is to be appreciated”.
Sanz, for his part, pointed out that one of the objectives of his team is to “recover the international relevance that it had lost”, something that is about to be achieved in 2024. For now, the parties have been summoned to “work in a together the next edition, in which there will be an Andalusian, Spanish and European presence” in its programming, the president of the Academy advanced.
It was the delegate of Culture of the Seville City Council, Minerva Salas, who argued last week the “incompatibility” of celebrating the Latin Grammys in the same month (the first time they have been held outside the US) and the Film Festival Seville European. The Government then argued that the scenic spaces in November were already blocked, as well as that the Festival management had recommended its postponement. It didn’t take long for some discomfort to arise in the film industry, which feared that this event could lose its continuity and, with it, all the struggle that Seville has waged to become a benchmark for the industry.
The unresolved bureaucratic problems due to the hasty departure of the previous Festival management and the formation of the new team (led by Tito Rodríguez) as well as the holding of municipal elections, made it impossible to meet the necessary deadlines in terms of tenders and processes. administrative costs, for which the city council announced, without prior consultation with the sector, to celebrate the XX edition of the Festival in spring, a “bad date”, according to what the industry pointed out, due to the festivities that take place in Seville at this time and that they entail a significant increase in the cost of hotels and flights.
This “special edition” in November, as the mayor of the city has defined it, prevents the capital from ceasing to be a benchmark within cinema due to the continuity that this implies, and the commitment to resume its usual date in future editions has calmed the waters within the sector. Of course, it has not yet been announced how the event will be held this year or what characteristics it has, something that will be worked on in the coming weeks and for which the city council has the outstretched hand of professionals Sevillian cinema.
