The “Muestra de Cine” festival was held in Ascaso, a tiny, barely inhabited village, in the province of Huesca, the central part of the Pyrenees, about sixty kilometers as the crow flies south of Lourdes. To get there, you have to take a long winding road, which climbs and twists.
“Everything is small here”, summarizes Miguel Cordero, one of the two co-directors of the festival. “We are 1,000 meters above sea level, there are six houses and a church. We also like the small cinema, with a reduced budget“, he continues. Moreover, the main projection room is not a room, but a field behind a barn: rows of chairs have been arranged there and a large white screen installed against the wall.
This expression of “the smallest festival in the world” above all makes it possible to talk about the event. “The first objective is to bring auteur, independent cinema, which has many awards at international festivals, but which in Spain has no commercial distribution”suggests Miguel Cordero.
“We also want to rebuild the village, because it was a village in ruins.”
Miguel Cordero, co-director of the Ascaso festivalat franceinfo
The festival drains a little public aid which makes it possible to renovate the village. “So we decided to rebuild not only the houses, but also the paths or even the buildings where the festival is held today, which were buildings designed for animals.“, details the co-director. The reconstructed village then hosts exhibitions, screenings, and especially conferences after the films.
This year, on the poster of the festival, there was in particular an exhibition devoted to the actor José Luis López Vázquez, who is a monument of Spanish cinema, who shot more than 200 films and who refused a career in Hollywood. He would have been 100 years old in 2022, his son was present at the festival. A French film was also screened: Back to Reims,, adaptation of the essay by sociologist Didier Eribon. The screening allowed a dialogue with the public on the plight of the working class and the rise of the extreme right in France and Spain.