The Festival de Málaga will be holding its next edition from 6 to 15 March 2026 and has chosen for its poster the work 'La mar de encuentros' by the cartoonist Pepo Pérez. As in previous editions, the festival has chosen to commission the work directly, considering this to be a better way of reflecting its image and discourse.

This was announced by the Festival de Málaga at a press conference with the participation of the Mayor of Malaga, Francisco de la Torre; the Councillor for Culture and Historical Heritage of Malaga City Council, Mariana Pineda; the Director of the Festival de Málaga and Manager of Malaga Procultura, Juan Antonio Vigar, and the designer of the poster, Pepo Pérez. Representatives from the institutions and companies sponsoring the event also participated: the Deputy Government Delegate in Malaga, Francisco Javier Salas; the Secretary General for Cultural Innovation and Museums of the Regional Government of Andalusia, José Ángel Vélez; the Director General for Tourism Promotion and Development of the Regional Government of Andalusia, Gemma del Corral; the Deputy Delegate for Security and Emergencies of Malaga Provincial Council, Luis José Rodríguez del Pozo; the Deputy Director of the Film Department of RTVE, Gervasio Iglesias; the producer from Atresmedia Cine, Rosa Pérez; the regional head of the "la Caixa" Foundation in Andalusia, Ceuta and Melilla, Juan Carlos Barroso; the director of CaixaBank's Business Area in Malaga, Luis Felipe Siles; the Head of External Relations of Victoria Beer, Sergio Ragel; and the editor-in-chief of Diario Sur, Ana Pérez-Bryan. Representatives from Alimentos de España and Repsol were unable to attend.

As Juan Antonio Vigar explained, the organisers have chosen Pepo Pérez, an illustrator and designer from Malaga, to create a poster that depicts cinema and culture as meeting places and thus symbolises the festival's capacity to bring together different points of view, talents and sensibilities around the seventh art, consolidating Malaga as a point of connection between creators, the public and the film industry.

About the poster 

According to Pepo Pérez, the design of the poster for the 29th Festival de Málaga is the result of a collaborative effort with the festival's management team. The main idea behind the poster is to represent the Festival as a multicultural meeting point, a reflection of the city of Malaga itself, cosmopolitan due to its historical tradition; also as a crossroads for people of different ages, genders, generations and cultures. “The red carpet by the sea is not only a nod to the beaches of Malaga, linking them metaphorically to cinema, but also to the other side of the Atlantic, to our sister culture of Latin America, which contributes so many good films to this Festival”, Pérez added.

The “vignettes” or “screens” that frame these different multicultural perspectives serve both to generate a dynamic design, a “superposition” of views of the landscape, and to refer to media frames that evoke cinema and comics. These "vignettes" or "screens" have been used to construct different fictional frames, some of them clearly referring to film fiction (the character lowering his sunglasses, directly inspired by films by Fellini and Berlanga), others more to everyday reality. Thus, the "characters" of each "vignette" or "screen" can come from the cinema or be its own spectators.

Meanwhile, the red carpet on the sand, beneath all these characters, reflects the physical and real meeting point where, every year, in every edition of the Festival de Málaga, spectators look out to see the protagonists of the film production pass by.

The author noted that he also wanted to hand-draw the typography, as a tribute to traditional analogue typography and to contemporary comic book artists such as Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, and Catherine Meurisse, who often hand-letter even the titles of their covers: “I also wanted to add a distinctive element to the poster in contrast to the dominant use of computers in our time (which I have only used for colouring; everything else is drawn with pencil, brush and ink on paper)”, he explained.

About Pepo Pérez

Pepo Pérez (Juan Carlos Pérez García, Málaga, 1969) is an associate professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Málaga, in the area of Drawing. With a degree and PhD in Fine Arts (2012), he was previously Professor of Administrative Law (1996-2021).

His artistic work has primarily focused on drawing, comics, and graphic arts. Co-author with Santiago García of the graphic novels El vecino ( since 2004), translated in France by Dargaud Éditeur and adapted into an audiovisual series for Netflix (2019-2021, two seasons), he has drawn hundreds of illustrations and comic pages in media such as Rockdelux, El Periódico de Catalunya, El País, Tinta Libre, NSLM, El Manglar and El Estafador. New author award at Expocómic Madrid 2004, Diario de AvisosAward  2006, nominations as New Author and Disclosure Award at the Saló Internacional del Cómic de Barcelona in its 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2010 editions.

He has been a visiting scholar at the School of Visual Arts in New York (2013) and artist in residence at La Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême (2014) and has also carried out research stays at centres such as the Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l'Image in Angoulême, the Université Clermont Auvergne and the Accademia di Belle Arte di Palermo.

As a theorist he has published numerous articles on art and humanities in indexed scientific journals and book chapters. He has also written since the late nineties for press media (+270 articles) such as Rockdelux, U, Volumen, El Periódico de Catalunya or the graphic arts magazine Mincho.

He has coordinated collective books such as Cómic digital hoy ( ACDCómic, 2016), Enseñar el arte. Seis experiencias desde la universidad ( Turpin, 2019) or UMA Graphic Art (UmaEditorial, 2025, in press) and has organised university summer courses. He has curated several exhibitions, including, for the Ministry of Culture and the University of Malaga, the group show Premio Nacional de Cómic. 10 years. 2007-2017 (2017-2018, Exhibition Hall of the Rectorate of the UMA, travelling to Tetuan and Seville).

He has given guest lectures (+60) at Spanish institutions and in other cities such as New York, Bordeaux, Fribourg (Switzerland) and Angoulême; he has contributed papers to international congresses (around 40) and exhibited (+45 exhibitions) in exhibition halls and fairs in Spanish cities and others such as Lisbon, Porto, Warsaw, Angoulême, Istanbul and Tokyo.

His most recent lines of research have focused mainly on digital comics and the representation of collective and historical memory in comics and the visual arts. Member of the Research Group 'Poetics of Fiction in Contemporary Arts' (HUM-941), he has collaborated as a researcher in the international COST Action (funded by the EU) 'iCOn- MICS Action. Investigation on Comics and Graphic Novels in the Iberian Cultural Area',COST CA19119 (2020-2024), with Professor Viviane Alary, Professor at Clermont Auvergne University, as Principal Researcher.