Bueu, July 17, 2025 – The Bueu Film Festival presents one of the central focuses of the program for the upcoming edition, which will take place from September 5th to 20th.
Through the five films that make up the Retrospective Section, which will be held on Saturday, September 13th at 5:00 PM at the Centro Social do Mar auditorium, the figure of the exile and the question of identity will be addressed. These works explore, around the concept of exile, different narrative and aesthetic responses from avant-garde filmmakers such as Alexander Kluge, João César Monteiro, Chantal Akerman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Jomí García Ascot.
- Brutalität in Stein (Brutality in Stone, 1961) was the first film made by the German filmmaker Alexander Kluge. In it, he deals with the return to the ruins and the barbarism of the Nazi ideology promoted by the Third Reich.
- The Portuguese director João César Monteiro, also in his directorial debut, forces the reunion of poetic language with the voice and body of its creator. Exile and return, in this case, revolve around the poet, also Portuguese, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969).
- Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman presents in La Chambre (The Room, 1972) a delicate exercise in self-observation, in this piece filmed during Akerman’s exile in New York City.
- Pier Paolo Pasolini delivers with Pasolini e la forma della città (Pasolini and the Shape of the City, 1974) a cinematic essay in which the Italian poet offers a premonitory warning about the fascist threat.
- And at the center of this selection of filmic gestures related to exile is the nearly unknown short film by Jomí García Ascot, Remedios Varo 1913–1963 (1967). García Ascot embraces here the voice of María Luisa Elío to venture into the depths of Remedios Varo’s painting.
This entire universe served as the inspiration for the final image of this 18th edition of FICBUEU. Work was done around the idea of playing with textures and the application of color over various stills from the short film Remedios Varo 1913–1963, by Jomí García Ascot. In this way, it references heat movements and the use of map texture as a metaphor for displacement as a creative and aesthetic driver.
For this year’s edition of the festival, researcher and educator José Manuel Mouriño is the author of «Caderno» FICBUEU #6. Destiny as Form. Images of Exile / Exiles of the Image, in dialogue with the five titles that make up the Retrospective Section, which he also curates. Through this, he proposes an exploration of the concept of exile and the world of cinematographic and audiovisual imagery.
The «Caderno» FICBUEU #6, is part of the series of annual publications with which FICBUEU aims to contribute to film bibliography and historiography, focusing on short films—a format often overlooked in film history books.
This issue, «Caderno» FICBUEU #6. Destiny as Form. Images of Exile / Exiles of the Image, delves into the relationship between the concept of exile and the world of cinematic imagery through the processes of search and reflection of two women poets and creators: actress María Luisa Elío and philosopher María Zambrano.
Based on their thinking, the text explores how certain authors embrace the creative process essentially as a lived experience—where life and work converge (and blur).
The foundational study of this publication is a line of research from the María Zambrano Laboratory of Audiovisual Poetics, part of the Zambrano Foundation Vélez-Málaga.
The presentation of the «Caderno» FICBUEU #6, led by its author José Manuel Mouriño, will take place on Saturday, September 13th at 11:00 AM in the Amalia Domínguez Búa Room. This event will also feature the presence of Diego García, son of Jomí García Ascot, director of one of the films featured in the Retrospective Section, Remedios Varo 1913–1963 (1967).
