- The premiere will take place on Friday 24th March at 19:30 at King’s College London. Free entry.
- At the end of the film there will be a Q&A via Skype with the directors.
- The film will be screened in Galician with subtitles in English.
London, 14th March 2017. The feature-length documentary Os días afogados will be screened for the first time in the UK on Friday 24th March at the sixth edition of the Galician Film Forum (GFF). The event will take place at King’s College London [19:30, Strand Campus, WC2R 2LS). Tickets are free, but must be reserved in advance here. At the end of the screening there will be a Q&A via Skype with the directors of the film, César Souto Vilanova and Luís Avilés Baquero.
The film will be screened in Galician with English subtitles and will be introduced in both languages. Information about the event can be found on the GFF’s website. This event is possible thanks to support from the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies department at King’s College London and the production company Amanita Films.
Os días afogados is a feature-length documentary that tells the story of what happened in 1992 when the Lindoso dam was built in Portugal and submerged the villages of Aceredo and Buscalque (Ourense, Galicia) underwater forever. Aware that they would lose their homes and would not be able to return to where they had grown up, some of the people who lived in these villages started to film their lives towards the middle of the 60’s. This material was added to in the late 80’s when Francisco Villalonga’s home recordings on life in Aceredo were produced.
In using this footage, César Souto and Luís Avilés’ film manages to preserve that which was about to disappear. They intersperse these images from the past with images from the present day that show what happened to some of those people who had to leave their homes. Even though they use footage from the past, this does not make it a film solely about the past, but rather a lesson that ‘in the end, the past hasn’t died, nor has it passed’, to use the words of César Souto.
Award-winning documentary
Os días afogados will premiere in London after being screened at multiple national and international festivals. It has won many prizes, including the award for Best Film at the Latin American International Documentary Festival held in Santiago de Chile (FIDOCS), Best National Documentary at 11th MiradasDoc and Crowd Choice and the Uptofest award at the 48th edition of the Alcances Documentary Cinema Festival. It was also recognised as the Best Documentary at the 14th Mestre Mateo awards and was awarded the Crowd Choice award at the 11th International Showcase of Ethnographic Cinema held at the Museo do Pobo Galego.
About the directors
Luís Avilés Baquero produces programmes like Criaturas and Casamos on Televisión de Galicia, both receiving the highest number of viewers in their timeslot. He is the director behind A subela (2003) and Unary (2015) which won the Mestre Mateo award for best short film and the prize for best direction at the Festival de Amedo. His first fictional feature-length film, Retornos (2010), was shown at the Montreal, Valladolid, Sao Paulo and León festivals, and won two Mestre Mateo awards.
César Souto Vilanova is a journalist who has been professionally linked to the Televisión de Galicia since 1998. Since 2006 he has specialised in producing reports on aspects of the current political and social scape in Galicia, in Spain and across the world, first for the programme REC cámara and then for Reporteiros. Os días afogados is the first time he has worked on a documentary piece.
Galician Film Forum
The GFF started in 2015 when a group of Galician emigrants living in London came together to create a space where Galician cinema could be screened in the UK capital. It has three main aims, to serve as an exhibition platform, to be a showcase for audiovisual creativity in the diaspora and to allow for reflection on Galician cinema and culture.
