The Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons, author of films such as Carícies, Amor idiota or Amic/Amat, died this Monday in Barcelona at the age of 78, as sources from his production company Els Films de la Rambla have confirmed to the ACN agency and have advance figures such as the former director of the Catalan Cinema Academy, Isona Passola, on the X network.
He has been the most prolific author in Catalan in history, with more than 30 feature films in his filmography. He was also a producer and screenwriter and an important promoter of the film world in Catalonia. He adapted texts by contemporary authors such as Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluís-Anton Baulenas, Jordi Puntí and Ferran Torrent, and directed a dozen plays. His career earned him the Creu de Sant Jordi in 2007 and the Gaudí d’ Honor award in 2015.
He survived a brain hemorrhage, a serious bicycle accident, and a gunshot wound to his spine in Mexico. Ventura Pons, who boasted of his poor health, died today at 78 years of age. He had “cinema in his head” and was in charge of internationalizing Catalan cinematography since his first film Ocaña, retrat intermitent (1978), a profile of the Andalusian painter José Pérez Ocaña, which was selected to participate in the Cannes Festival.
Enric Majó and Fernando Guillén led the large cast of The Vicar of Olot (1981), Pons’s second film, a comedy about sex and religion that had its success in the open-minded Spain of the Transition. So Pons continued down the path of comedy and in 1986 he premiered La rossa del bar (The Blonde from the Bar), again with Majó, one of the most renowned theater actors in Barcelona in the 80s.
Pons changed gears in his next work and immersed himself in a genre that Carlos Saura and José Antonio de la Loma also cultivated, quinqui cinema, with Puta misèria (1989) with Antonio Ferrandis and Amparo Moreno. But in 1991 he returned to comedy with a flirtation film that was a success among the adolescent audience of the time, Què t’hi jugues, Mari Pili? (What’s at stake Mari Pili), where the protagonists make a kind of bet: make out with the first man who asks them his name.
Starting in the nineties, Pons had already established himself and directed films with almost annual regularity. He directed films such as Aquesta nit o mai (Tonight or Never) (1992), a comedy with shades of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Rosita, please! (1993), again with Amparo Moreno; El perquè de tot plegat (The Why of Things) (1994), based on the book of the same title by Quim Monzó, or Actresses (1996), a metatheatrical drama that featured a luxury cast: Nuria Espert, Rosa María Sardà , Ana Lizarán and Mercé Pons.
Sardà became Pons’ favorite actress and the protagonist of several of his following titles such as Carícies (1998), a choral drama about love; Amic/Amat (1999), a film based on a work by Josep María Benet i Jornet, or Anita no perd el tren (Anita does not miss the train) (2001), a film about second chances where Sardà is the box office of a cinema who doesn’t know what to do with his life when the room closes its doors.
Pons did know what to do to save a cinema. In 2014 he recovered the Texas theater in Barcelona as a space for culture and leisure: “Cinemas are not for me, they are for people to go see movies on the big screen in good conditions, with good sound and a good screen-to-viewer relationship. There are to make it easier for people to return to the cinema,” explained the director in an interview given to La Vanguardia in 2019 on the occasion of the publication of his memoirs.
He was also vice president of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences for two years and a councilor of the SGAE for twelve, but he ended up somewhat burned out on cultural policy and institutions and resigned from the Spanish Academy and also of the Catalan. “Now I’m only from Europe,” the director, who was nominated four times for the Goya, said in the same interview, although he was very clear that “the prize is making the film.”
The resurrection of Texas cinemas came to an end in 2020 when they closed permanently. Pons’ career had also declined over time, but the filmmaker was determined to continue doing what he loved most: cinema. So he auctioned off his art collection to make a new movie about his childhood. “I don’t have a penny,” he said. He had other projects in mind, but he didn’t have time to bring them to the big screen. Pons had already said goodbye to cinema in 2019 with Be Happy!, a musical starring two great veterans Sian Phillips and Vicky Peña.
But his prolific career had left many other titles for fans of the seventh art such as Idiot Love (205), La vida abismal (2007), Forasteros (2008) or Manjar de amor, which participated in the 2002 Berlin Film Festival. The Berlinale It was a second home for Pons, who participated in the contest five times, and the platform that served him to internationalize Catalan cinema.
The reactions to the death of Pons have not been long in coming. In addition to Passola, the Minister of Culture of the Generalitat Natàlia Garriga has described him as “an indisputable referent of Catalan audiovisual”. “The country loses a great filmmaker, an indisputable referent of Catalan audiovisual and a tireless worker of culture and language,” he wrote on the X network. The Academy of Cinema, of which Pons was vice president, recalled that he was nominated for the Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay on four occasions: for The reason for everything, Actrius, Anita no perd el tren and Barcelona (a map).
For its part, the Catalan Film Academy has issued a statement in which it highlights Pons as “one of the most important filmmakers in our country and who has done the most for Catalan cinema and in Catalan. A reference for many generations for his talent , his sensitivity and his ability to connect with the public, his prolific career has been recognized inside and outside the home.
In 2015, Pons directed Cola, Colita, Colassa (Ode to Barcelona), a tribute to the photographer Colita who has only survived nine days.
