José Luis Guerin

One often says of Cat­a­lan film­maker José Luis Gue­rin that he makes the films of the ­future. With every new pic­ture he ­explores the edge of cin­ema and tries to give it a ­deeper mean­ing. His first film, Los Moti­vos de Berta (1983), was pre­sented at the fes­ti­vals of Rot­ter­dam, ­Locarno, Lon­don, Chi­cago, ­Montréal, Lis­sa­bon and oth­ers, and was ­awarded with the Sant Jordi Price for the Best Span­ish Film. City Life (1988) ­received ­prices at the fes­ti­vals of Ber­lin, Rot­ter­dam and ­Montréal. With Innis­free (1990) – which was ­awarded with sev­eral inter­na­tional ­prizes – he ­returned to the small Irish vil­lage where John Ford had made The Quiet Man. He ­explored what ­impact the shoot­ing of the film had made on the pop­u­la­tion. Tren de Som­bras (Train of Shad­ows), the win­ner of the ­Golden ­Méliès 1997 and the movie that he will ­present to us, is a dar­ing study about the ­effects of light and time, an ­attempt to res­ur­rect the death on cel­lu­loid.