Pilar Miró, a magnetic personality

20/04/2021.- The spanish filmmaker Pilar Miró had doubtlessly  a complex character and a magnetic  personality whose traits  are reflected in her film work, to which she devoted herself passionately. A pioneer among women dedicated to making television programs, she became general director of Cinematography and of the Spanish public broadcaster Radio Televisión Española (1986-1989).

She visited Seminci for the first time in 1967, during the 12th edition, when the festival was still known as “International Film Week of Human and Religious Values” There she met another young critic, José Luis Garci, who was also visiting the festival for the first time.

That would not be the only time that the paths of the Madrid film director and Seminci crossed, since one of the retrospectives of the 37th edition was dedicated to her. Fernando Lara, the Festival’s director at the time, explained that the motivation behind that tribute was “to carry out a thorough analysis of this controversial figure in all her facets, since without her the Spanish cinema of the last 15 years cannot be understood”. The retrospective dedicated to Pilar Miró reviewed her whole career, including “both a wide selection of her works for television and her six feature films for the large screen, culminating in Beltenebros, awarded with the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, which indicates the clear progression of this director towards creative and stylistic maturity ,” Lara argued.

She died the same the year she won her first Goya award for Best Director for “The Dog in the Manger” (1997). It happened a few days after the start of the 42th Seminci, which dedicated that edition to the memory of Pilar Miró and made two gestures towards her. The first was the screening of The Bird of Happiness (1993), the seventh feature film by the prolific Madrid-born filmmaker. And the second was the renaming of the Festival’s Best New Director Award as the ‘Pilar Miró’ Award for Best New Director.

The last tribute took place during the 64 · Seminci, where on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of The Cuenca Crime (1979), the only film banned in Spain during democracy, the Festival screened the documentary “Regresa el Cepa”, by Víctor Matellano.