MADRID.- The spectacular The Snow Society and the most serene 20,000 species of bees are the favorite movies Goya Awards of Spanish cinema, which are presented on Saturday in a gala overshadowed by accusations of sexual assault against a director.
The ceremony will take place on Saturday night in Valladolid (northwest), and will have the American actress Sigourney Weaver as its star protagonist. The 74-year-old performer, famous for Alien, o Gorillas in the Mistwill collect in person the honorary Goya for his entire career.
The director Pedro Almodovar, the actress Penelope Cruz, or the actors Gael García Bernal and José Sacristán, will be some of those in charge of presenting the awards. The veteran Spanish singer and actress Ana Belén will present the gala together with the couple of directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known as Los Javis.
The gala takes place two weeks after the newspaper El País published the testimony of three women who accused the Madrid director Carlos Vermut of subjecting them to very harsh sex against their will.
Vermut, 43 years old, Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2014 for Magical Girldenied the facts, stating that he was not: “aware of having exercised sexual violence against any woman.”
“I have always practiced rough sex in a consensual manner, because I believe that consent is very important,” she added, something that disagrees with the story of the women, who preferred to remain anonymous and did not bring the facts to justice for fear that would harm them professionally.
Coinciding with the complaints against Vermut, others surfaced against another, less well-known director, Armando Ravelo, among them those of an artist who claimed that he offered him drugs and to watch porn when he was 14 years old.
Momento Me Too
The organizer of the Goya, the Spanish Film Academy, announced that it will make visible at the gala: “the demand that sexual violence and abuses of power have no place in the world of cinema or in Spanish society as a whole.”
The accusations of sexual assault by numerous actresses against the American producer Harvey Weinstein, which gave birth to the Me Too movement, encouraged people to denounce abuses in this sector.
Spanish cinema had so far been unscathed, and the moment of catharsis in Spain came in sport, with the outrage over the unwanted kiss on the mouth that the president of the football federation, Luis Rubiales, planted on the footballer Jenni Beautiful for everyone to see in a stadium, or the accusation of rape against the Brazilian footballer Dani Alves, for which he was tried this week in Barcelona.
Bees vs. Andes
20,000 species of beesby the Basque filmmaker Estibaliz Urresola, narrates, in an intimate tone and in a Basque town, transidentity in childhood.
It is the film with the most Goya nominations, fifteen, and it comes with the endorsement of the Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival for best performance for the child-actress Sofía Otero, who, curiously, is not nominated for the Spanish awards because she is under 16 years old.
In front, with 13 nominations, will be The Snow Societyby Barcelona director Juan Antonio Bayona, which tells the true story of some young Uruguayan rugby players whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 and who survived, after being presumed dead, more than two months of hunger and cold in the Mountain range.
This Hollywood-style Spanish production aspires to two Oscars, for best international film and for best makeup and hair.
In addition to the films by Urresola and Bayona, they complete the list of contestants for film of the year They know The One by David Trueba, One Love by Isabel Coixet and Close the eyes by Victor Erice.
Erice – who at 83 years old returned to film a feature film after a break of three decades -, Trueba, Coixet and Bayona compete for the trophy for best direction, along with Elena Martín, for Creature.
In the race to win the Ibero-American film of the year are the Venezuelan Simon, Argentina Madam, the chilean The infinite memorythe Portuguese living soul and, for the first time, a Puerto Rican production, Fishbowl.
Source: AFP
