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Tomorrow the Festival will hold a reading of his poem “A Requiem for the XXth Century”, chosen by his son, and will dedicate to the Lithuanian artist its fifth Notebook and its “Retrospective”, which celebrates his career through nine of his films.

13.09.24. BUEU. This Sunday, September 15, is Poetry Day, created by the Georges Pompidou National Centre for Art and Culture in Paris. The Lithuanian-born poet and director Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) will be the person being honoured this year. Mekas is considered the founder of American avant-garde and experimental cinema. FICBUEU joins an event in which thirty artistic and cultural institutions from cities around the world also participate: from the French capital to New York or Los Angeles, passing through Vilnius, London, Porto, Milan, Stockholm, Seoul, Tokyo or Tehran. In Spain, only the Bueu International Film Festival is on that list. In fact, FICBUEU will be the first to join the international tribute, tomorrow Saturday, with its particular tribute to this pioneering creator and guardian of free and independent cinema that inspired masters such as Martin Scorsese or Jim Jarmusch.

Cinema and literature

In addition to being the guiding thread in this edition of the festival’s visual style, the FICBUEU dedicates its “Retrospective” section to Jonas Mekas with the aim of bringing his figure and his work closer to its public, where his cinema becomes literature and with which he offers a reflection on the nature of existence and the human condition. The 9 short films selected from his filmography will be shown tomorrow, at 5:00 p.m. But before that, joining the Poetry Day organized by the Pompidou, there will be a reading of one of the poet and filmmaker’s favorite poems, A Requiem for the XXth Century. It was chosen by his son, Sebastian Mekas, and translated from English to Galician by Adrián Estévez. He will be in charge of reading it to the public.

Visual journey through five decades

The screening will begin immediately afterwards, a visual journey through Mekas’ film work between 1966 and 2011, from his first films to his last, which combine everyday and significant moments of life from a perspective very close to poetry and documentary, and which show the artist’s relationship with his environment and his nonconformity. Among the short films by Mekas that the festival will show are the emblematic Cassis (1966), which challenges narrative conventions by capturing everyday life in an uninterrupted sequence of images, and Mozart Wien&Elvis (2000), with shots of Elvis Presley’s last performance in New York in 1972, preceded by others from Vienna that he recorded years before. In addition, Notes of the Circus, Hare Krishna and Report from Millbrook (all from 1966), Travel songs (a travelling film around Europe between 1967 and 1981), Quartet #1 (1981), Imperfect Three-Image Films (1995) and Song of Avignon (1998) will be screened.

The tribute is completed by Cuaderno FICBUEU #5, which addresses the figure of the filmmaker through a critical review of his career and focusing on the shorts chosen for his retrospective. The book will be presented tomorrow at 11:00 am, and its author, the researcher, teacher and music photographer Nieves Febrer, will be at the event. The General Secretariat for Language Policy has supported, once again, the publication of Cuaderno FICBUEU, also translated from Spanish to Galician by Adrián Estévez.

Mekas, a key cultural and artistic figure

Jonas Mekas began exploring avant-garde cinema with his 16mm camera in 1949, after arriving from Lithuania to New York and having spent 10 years in a Nazi concentration camp. He eventually played a key role in the New American Cinema movement in the 1960s and 1970s and was followed and admired by other great voices of the cultural revolution of the time such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag.

A tireless protector of independent filmmakers, Mekas always advocated for freedom of artistic expression by co-founding the Film Makers Cooperative, fighting against censorship and looking towards emancipation from conventional cinematic norms. He continued making experimental films until he was 80 years old. Some of them have been screened, in addition to cinemas, in some of the most important museums in the United States and Europe.

FICBUEU FILMMAKERS AND JURIES VISIT ONS ISLAND

“Discovering the town of Bueu”, the programme organised for FICBUEU guests, took filmmakers and members of the festival jury this morning to Ons, one of the four islands that form part of the Illas Atlánticas de Galicia Maritime-Terrestrial National Park. They went on a hiking route with a stop at the Ons Visitor Centre, located in the building of the island’s old school and where there is an exhibition focused on the customs and traditions of its inhabitants. It is worth remembering that it is precisely on Ons where FICBUEU carries out its Residency, a project to develop short film scripts with filmmakers that premiered in 2023 with Isabel Peña – screenwriter of films such as As Bestas or El Reino and the Antidisturbios series – as tutor. This year it will be held between 16 and 23 October and will be coordinated by Estibaliz Urresola, director of the film 20,000 species of bees, which won three Goya awards, including those for best screenplay and best new director.

This afternoon, filmmakers and judges will take a guided tour of the Massó Museum, located in the industrial warehouses of the former Massó Hermanos canning factory, next to the port of Bueu. Tomorrow they will take part in an outing with traditional boats organised with the Os Galos Association and, upon their return, they will participate in a meal based on products with a designation of origin sponsored by the Consellería do Mar through the pescadeRías brand.