- The screening will take place at 7pm on 10th November at King’s College London. Tickets are free.
- At the end of the screening there will be a Q&A via videoconference with Jorge Coira, film director, and Araceli Gonda, co-scriptwriter.
- 18 Meals is one of the most popular Galician films in recent years
London, 7th November 2016. The seventh event held by the Galician Film Forum (GFF), the screening of Jorge Coira’s 18 Meals, will take place on Friday 10th November at King’s College London (7pm, Strand Campus, Edmond J Safra Theatre, WC2R 2LS). Tickets are free, but should be reserved in advance here. After the screening there will be a Q&A via videoconference with Jorge Coira and Araceli Gonda, co-scriptwriter.
The film will be screened in its original version with English subtitles and will be presented in both English and Galician. Information about the event can be found on the GFF website (galicianfilmfourm.gal). The Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies department at King’s College London has once again generously supported this event.
18 Meals is a film that tells six different stories that take place over the course of one day in Santiago de Compostela as people sit down to eat. The 24 characters in the film eat breakfast, have lunch and sit down to dinner with the mood changing from comedy to drama. Together the storeis create a lively and food-based mosaic of what it’s like to be on the search for happiness.
The actors did not film with a script, but armed with the knowledge of the plot and a sense of their characters, the rest was down to their improvisation. The film had just €500,000 of funding behind it and was filmed in nine days. Production work then took eight months; Coira describes this as some of his ‘most personal work’ and the film went on to be very well received by audiences, something that was quite unexpected for a film of this kind.
The film was screened at cinemas across Spain for several months and was taken to thirty film festivals across the world, including ones in France, America, Mexico, Columbia, Italy, Finland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Macedonia, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, etc.
The film’s fantastic reception is reflected in the awards it has received outside Galicia including the prize for Best Director at the Taomina International Festival (Italy), Special Mention at the 15th Bienneal Spanish Film Festival in Annecy (France) and the prize for Best Film at Festival Douro Film Harvest in Portugal. In Spain 18 Meals received the prize for Best Film and the Audience’s Choice at the CinEsCena Festival Internacional de Cinema Gastronómico Ciudad de La Laguna, the Jury’s Choice and the Audience’s Choice at the OUFF International Film Festival in Ourense as well as seven Mestre Mateo awards, Galicia’s audiovisual awards.
About Jorge Coira
Jorge Coira trained himself as a film director, starting his professional career at the end of the 90’s. Having filmed several short films, his first feature-length film, O ano da carracha, was released in 2004 and in 2010 he released 18 comidas, his second film. He has also worked on television, working on several Galician TV series including Terra de Miranda, As leis de Celavella, Padre Casares and Luci, as well as Spanish series including El comisario, RIS, Pelotas and Sé quien eres. His documentaries include Torre de Breoghán, ¿Que culpa tiene el tomate? and Días de reparto. In 2016 he won a Goya award for his work on Dani de la Torre’s El desconocido.
Galician Film Forum
The GFF was born in 2015 when a group of Galicians who had emigrated to London came together to bring Galician cinema to London. The GFF functions in three different ways, as an exhibition platform, as an insight into diasporic creators working in the UK and as a space to reflect on Galician cinema and culture on more universal terms.
