‘The Film Counter’, a fable about the power of cinema for the opening of the Official Selection’

Despite winning the Golden Spike in 2000 with Italian for Beginners, one of the jewels of the Dogma movement, it was not until this morning that Lone Scherfig personally attended the Valladolid International Film Festival.

It has done so with La contadora de películas, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Hernán Rivera Letelier, which opens tonight’s Official Selection, and the story of a girl who, in the 1960s, dedicates herself to telling the people of her town, in the middle of the Chilean desert, about the films that they cannot afford to pay for.

“Cinema is not just about watching the film, it’s about watching it accompanied,” said Adolfo Blanco, one of the film’s producers, in relation to both the plot itself and the current situation in which the rise of platforms has displaced consumption in theaters. “The problem with auteur cinema today is that it has no place in the media,” said Scherfig.

With a screenplay signed by Walter Salles, Isabel Coixet and Rafa Russo, this story is the Danish director’s first foray into Spanish, a “courage” praised by Antonio de la Torre, who stars in the film alongside France’s Bérénice Bejo.

The interpreter has pointed out that the main reason for accepting the role, in addition to filming it in the Atacama Desert, was the presence of Scherfig in the direction. “It is the film that, if I get old, I will remember, because it has been a wonderful experience,” he concluded.