The director and screenwriter Marcelo Piñeyro will receive the Retrospective Award at tonight's gala, in collaboration with the Málaga HOY newspaper, at the 27th edition of the Malaga Festival, for his long career that he has developed between Spain and Latin America.
 
'It is an honour to have been given this award, and even more so from the hands of such an important Festival as this one. When I saw the list of people who had previously received it, I thought they had made a mistake with me because it is a select group of great filmmakers', the director said in a meeting with the press and the audience led by the Festival's director, Juan Antonio Vigar.
 
With this award, the Festival wants to recognise the career of one of the most successful directors of in Spanish film, whose works are widely acclaimed by both critics and audiences.
 
The meeting reviewed Piñeyro's career, from his beginnings with 'Tango feroz' to his most recent creation, 'El Reino', a Netflix series that tells how a candidate for vice-president must take the place of the candidate for president in Argentina, after the latter is murdered during the election campaign and meanwhile the investigation of who committed the crime begins.
 
In this sense, he pointed out that with his fiction he expressed his fears 'for the advance of a new populist right wing', assuring that 'the worst nightmare' he could have had four months ago was 'one percent of the reality that Argentina is living now'.
 
'When I shot the first season, I felt that Argentina was institutionally protected from these kinds of political characters. However, when the second season premiered, everything changed, suddenly it took a turn, and since then, it has been getting worse. Now you open X (Twitter) and you read many comments from people who say that the current situation is the same as in the TV series', he pointed out.
 
The director pointed out that, at the beginning of his career, with his first films 'Tango feroz' and 'Caballos salvajes', his interest was in the struggle of young characters against a system that was restricting them, and that these films were conceived as a cultural resistance to neoliberalism. Now that both films are 30 years old and have been re-released in Argentinian cinemas, he is happy that many young people are going to the cinema to see them.
 
'In the 90s, young people clearly felt that they were left out of this neoliberalism. Resistance somehow was crystallised in films. Today there are other concerns and also a lot of influence from social media', he said.
 
Piñeyro said that he is working on the script of a new film, that he is 'looking forward' to returning to cinema after fiction. 'My plan is to make a film, the thing is then the format in which it will be distributed. As a creator, I'm committed to finding a human truth and real emotion,' he concluded.