Guest Country Spain
Bienvenido a Colonia, montadores españoles!
Welcome to Cologne, Spanish film editors!
Not only do our guests this year come from the sunny south of Europe, but the film Alcarrás, which is the centrepiece of our Guest Country Evening, is also characterised by sunny landscapes with wonderful family people – whose traditional peach cultivation, however, is overshadowed by social upheavals.
The autobiographically inspired work by director Carla Simón won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2022. Featuring an entirely amateur cast, the film succeeds in providing a very intimate glimpse into the family structures in a particular Catalan village – and at the same time resonates with universal political themes.
Like Simón, editor Ana Pfaff belongs to a new generation of Spanish filmmakers who have received international recognition in recent years. She had already edited Simón’s feature-length debut Summer 1993 (2017), which also used non-professional actors. For that work, Pfaff won the Catalan film award Gaudí and was nominated for the Spanish film award Goya.
Alcarràs is characterised by many small observations and subtleties, whose calm flow hardly reveals how demanding the editing process was, which lasted more than six months. In the workshop discussion with Ana Pfaff after the screening, we also take a look at other films in her career.
Edimotion presents the Guest Country Evening in cooperation with the Spanish editors' associations from Madrid and Barcelona:
Asociación de Montadores Audiovisuales de España (AMAE) and Associació de Muntadores i Muntadors Audiovisuals de Catalunya (AMMAC).
Representing these associations, Sergio Jiménez and Jaume Martí will give a short welcoming speech.
Saturday, 15 October 2022 | Filmforum at the Museum Ludwig
20:00 Reception with Spanish food and wine
21:00 Introduction and screening of Alcarràs
ESP & ITA 2022, 120 min., Catalan with english subtitles
Followed by a film talk with editor Ana Pfaff, moderated by Dietmar Kraus
The international programme at Edimotion is supported by the Filmfestivalförderprogramm de⁺ of the Goethe Institute.
© Irene Moray Ana Pfaff
Guest Country Spain
Born in Barcelona in 1985, Ana Pfaff started taking dance lessons at age 4, and later added classical guitar and a high school major in Fine Arts. She considers this artistic focus an important basis for her work as a film editor. From 2003 to 2007, she studied at the film school „Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya“ (ESCAC), specialising in film editing. From 2008 to 2009, she completed a Master's degree in Contemporary Film and Audiovisual Studies at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF).
As an editor, Ana Pfaff is equally at home in fiction films and documentaries, and has also edited several hybrid films. She mainly edits independent cinema productions of the new generation of Spanish and Catalan directors. She already collaborated with Clara Simón, director of the Berlinale winner Alcarràs, on her feature-length debut Summer 1993 (2017), for which Pfaff was nominated for the Spanish Film Critics Award and the Goya, and was awarded the Catalan film prize Gaudí for Best Editing. A second Gaudí followed in 2019 for the feature film The Days to Come (Els dies que vindran).
In addition to cinema productions, Ana Pfaff also works in the field of video art, collaborating on numerous occasions with artists Juan Carlos Bracho and and Momu & No Es, among others. Together with her colleague Ariadna Ribas, she founded the collective Dostopos, in order to realise own free-form short film projects. She also teaches editing at several film schools, such as ESCAC.
Filmography (selection)
2022 Song to a Lady in the Shadow (Canción a una dama en la sombra). Hybrid documentary essay. Carolina Astudillo Muñoz.
2022 Alcarràs. Feature film. Carla Simón.
2021 The Sacred Spirit (Espíritu sagrado). Feature film. Chema García Ibarra.
2021 Libertad. Feature film. Clara Roquet.
2019 La Mami. Documentary. Laura Herrero Garvín.
2019 The Days to Come (Els dies que vindran). Feature film. Carlos Marques-Marcet.
2018 Ainhoa: Yo no soy ésa. Documentary. Carolina Astudillo Muñoz.
2018 Facing the Wind (Con el viento). Feature film. Meritxell Colell.
2017 Thirty Souls (Trinta Lumes). Documentary. Diana Toucedo.
2017 Niñato. Hybrid documentary. Adrián Orr.
2017 Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993). Feature film. Carla Simón.
2014 Remine: el último movimiento obrero. Documentary. Marcos Merino.
©Piffl Medien Alcarràs
Guest Country Spain
The children seem to be the first to suspect that their world is in upheaval when their beloved junk car is stolen by an excavator. For generations, the Solé family has been growing peaches in Alcarràs, a village on the western edge of Catalonia. The use of their land was once granted to them on a handshake-deal by landowner Pinyol, in gratitude for grandfather Solé hiding him during the Spanish Civil War. But this year’s harvest threatens to be their last, as young Pinyol wants to replace the fruit trees with a solar farm. Cracks appear in the family unit: Some of the adults want to adapt to the changes; others suppress the looming decline of their way of life by brooding in silence, or obsessively toiling, or angrily demonstrating.
ESP, ITA 2022.
Editor: Ana Pfaff. Director & Writer: Carla Simón. Writer: Arnau Vilaró. Director of Photography: Daniela Cajías. Composer: Andrea Koch. Sound: Eva Valiño, Thomas Giorgi, Alejandro Castillo. Production: Elastica Films, Avalon PC, Vilaüt Film, Alcarràs Film. Cast: Jordi Pujol Dolcet, Anna Otín, Xènia Roset, Albert Bosch, Josep Abad, u. a. Distributer: Piffl Medien, Berlin.
120 minutes, Catalan with English subtitles