Seminci presents the 65th edition’s official image

The jury of the 12th poster competition launched by Valladolid’s Fundación Municipal de Cultura and the Valladolid International Film Festival has singled out the proposal by graphic designer Carlos Arribas Pérez, named Lugar S (“The S Place”), as the official image of the forthcoming 65th edition of Seminci. Carlos Arribas Pérez has been a graphic designer since 1995. Educated at the Valladolid School of Arts and Crafts, he co-founded the studio Tangram, Diseño Gráfico and later worked, already as a freelance artist since 2010, under the brand name Luna Lunae. He was the winner in 2013 and 2014 of an Inspira de Oro Award for Best Advertising Campaign in Castile and León and two Inspira de Plata Awards, one in the same category and the other for the region’s Best Corporate Identity. Both awards were granted by Foro Ingenio, the Association of Advertising, Communication and Design Companies of Castile and León.

The winning poster’s underlying conception consists in identifying the Valladolid Festival (Seminci) at a glance by means of a simple yet very powerful graphic design that possesses a physical structure, as though it were a building. The design shows a unique and peculiar “entity” which the public enters through an access door that allows them to inhabit that “S place” where the experience of film-watching happens when one attends a movie screening: the experience, in other words, of living inside cinema itself.

The proposal selected for the Meeting Point section has been La luz de la sombra (“The Light of Shadows”) by León Jorge Barrientos. A Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca with majors in Graphic and Audiovisual Design, Barrientos’s professional career began in 1994 at ad agency GP&M, where he worked as copywriter and junior art director. He is currently art director at Gráficas Celarayn, a job he has had since 1998. He has been speaker at the International Designfest Conference (Guadalajara, Mexico) and collaborates in popularising design, illustration and advertising by giving talks at national secondary schools. He has received several awards for his posters and was the author of the official image of the 63rd edition of Seminci in 2018.

The author has tried to boil down the concept beneath the “Meeting Point” section to a fully minimalist visual narration: the mutual understanding between the narrated light and the character as an individual recipient. All of which takes place in the shadows of the dark projection room.

On the other hand, the winning poster for the Festival’s documentary section Time of History bears the title Vidas de Mujeres (“Women’s Lives”) and is signed by graphic designer Marta Villazón, who has a degree in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and works on the museumization of cultural spaces and editorial design.

For the artist, the image on her poster represents the memory of a playful moment in the real lives of women from a century ago. But the intent is also oneiric: to foreground the countless anonymous stories behind an old photograph, with which we fantasize, so that each image spawns a documentary. In this photographic composition, the author imagines the innumerable lives of its protagonists, the times they reinvented themselves, the dreams achieved and snatched away from them, the passions that moved them, the invisible lines they jumped over, but also the fact that eventually they managed to get on a plane so as not to have to imagine but to feel instead.

The poster competition jury was chaired by Ana Redondo García, the local councillor for Culture and Tourism. The other jurors were the Valladolid Festival director Javier Angulo Barturen; Juan Carlos Daza, a designer at dDc Diseño y Comunicación; Vanessa García Rivas, head of Marketing and Communication at the Escuela Superior de Diseño (ESI); Juan Manuel Guimerans, Area Manager for Culture and Tourism; Carmelo Irigoyen, Manager of the Fundación Municipal de Cultura; Sara Pérez Barreiro, PhD architect and a member of the University of Valladolid’s permanent research group on Architecture and Film; Angélica Tanarro Martín, cultural journalist and writer; and Daniel Villalobos Alonso, PhD architect and principal researcher of the University of Valladolid’s permanent research group on Architecture and Film.

The winners of the competition will receive cash awards respectively worth €3,000 for the author of the 65th edition’s official image and €600 for the authors of the Meeting Point and Time of History sections.

The number of entries submitted for competition in the contest’s 12th call amounts to a total of 652 —329 for the official image, 145 for Time of History and 178 for Meeting Point.