Festival de Málaga pays an emotional tribute to filmmaker Patricia Ferreira
His film Els nens salvatges won four Biznagas at the 2012 Festival
Before the start of this year, the film world received the sad news of the death of director and screenwriter Patricia Ferreira. The Festival de Málaga wanted to pay her a warm and affectionate tribute with the screening of Els nens salvatges, followed by a discussion with friends and colleagues including the president of the Spanish Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite; actor Àlex Monner; screenwriter Virginia Yagüe, producer Miriam Porté, and producer and president of the Andalusian Film Academy, Marta Velasco.
Cine Albéniz hosted the emotional meeting, where the attendees were able to remember the figure of the Madrid-born director who triumphed with films such as El alquimista impaciente or Se quién eres, whose premiere took place at the Berlin Film Festival and for which she was nominated for a Goya Award as Best New Director.
‘I still find it hard to talk about her in private,’ began Virginia Yagüe, Ferreira's co-screenwriter on most of her projects. ‘I can't believe she's no longer with us, she had a light, she had something in her eyes that got you hooked on her’, she recalled.
Along these lines, Monner also recalled how she directed him in what was the second project of his career, Els nens salvatges, and what she was like: ‘For me it was a very special shoot, because it was the first time I had left home to shoot outside, for so many days. I remember it as very exciting and very fondly. And I remember Patricia as a kind person, but very serious. She always wore sunglasses, but when she took them off and looked at you, she gave off a magic, her gaze had a light that seemed like that of a child. And as a teenager I loved that’, she said.
Yagüe also pointed out that Ferreiro left her two ‘very important’ life lessons. One is to ‘work well with documentation’ and the other is 'the dimension of what we wanted to tell'. 'She was a master at knowing what she wanted to tell and how she wanted to tell it. She had a strange balance between reason and intuition', he said.
The discussion, which was open to both the public and the press, also provided an opportunity to recall how her most awarded film at the Festival de Málaga in 2012, Els nens salvatges (which won four biznagas), came about, and how long it took to get the project off the ground. 'It took us at least five years to get it off the ground, and in the end we managed to do it thanks to Patricia's stubbornness and perseverance. She was also an expert in getting what she wanted', the film's producers noted.
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