The 68th edition of the Seminci will feature a total of 107 meetings including round tables, talks, presentations and dialogues that will contribute to enrich the film ecosystem of Valladolid. Seminci members will thus have multiple possibilities to approach the festival and interact with many of its protagonists.
In addition to the discussions with the filmmakers themselves that will take place after the screenings, many of them sponsored by the organization Derechos de Autor de Medios Audiovisuales (DAMA), there will be three other conversations at the Paraninfo of the University that will bring together some of the filmmakers of the Official Selection, such as Paula Ortiz (Teresa), Laura Ferrés (La imatge permanent) and Lois Patiño (Samsara).
The arrival of the Independent Film Market – MERCI Valladolid will also bring about a series of activities for the industry that will take place at the Broadway Cinemas, while the Palacio de Villena will host a laboratory of the Europa Cinemas network, which brings together more than 1,200 exhibition spaces from fifty countries.
Book presentations
In addition to these meetings, three book presentations will be held, two of them at the Espacio Seminci and another one at the Salón de los Espejos of the Calderón Theater. The latter will also feature a round table as a complement to the essay El cine de la India: tradiciones, rupturas y disidencias -one of the most extensive published by the Seminci in recent years and one of the most complete on Indian cinema published in Spain- with the participation of Tarsem Singh, filmmaker and director of music videos for Lady Gaga and R.E.M., among others, who will screen his latest film, Dear Jassi, out of competition in the Official Section.
In addition, digitized and open to the public on the festival’s website, the volume Cine independiente americano: Una introducción (American Independent Cinema: An Introduction) is presented this year. Conceived as a complement to the American independent film series of the 27th Seminci, this book, signed by programmers and critics Fernando Herrero and José Ignacio Fernández Bourgón, offers a journey through the freest, most personal and risky productions of the United States in the early eighties. Today fundamental authors such as Jim Jarmusch, Monte Hellman, John Sayles, Alexandre Rockwell, Jonas Mekas and John Waters already appear in the pages of a text that also reviews the trajectory of voices such as Robert Kramer, Eric Mitchell, Charles Burnett, Amos Poe, Kenneth Anger and George Kuchar, to mention just a few of those whom critics and film historiography have begun to rediscover in recent years
