A Goya helps promote a more ambitious project

Santander, (EFE).- The director Elías León Siminiani will seek, after obtaining the Goya for best fiction short film, to use the “support” of the award to establish his “unique” proposal and “unorthodox” cinematographic language in a feature film .

The filmmaker (Santander, 1971) has conquered the Film Academy with “Emotional Architecture 1959”, a thirty-minute short film that “follows the dotted line” of the work of the architect and urban planner Secundino Zuazo in Madrid, to draw a story of love between two young people of different social class.

Siminiani picked up his first Goya with “surprise” in his fourth nomination (two of the previous ones for long documentary and the other two for short fiction), but aware of the quality of his work, which has already won the Golden Spike in Valladolid.

A “surprise” Goya

In a telephone interview with EFE, the director acknowledges that both “Sorda”, by Eva Libertad and Lucía Muñoz, and the animated short “Cuerdas”, by Pedro Solís García, were proposals with “a much longer career” and “many many international awards”, so winning “was a surprise and a great joy”.

Among the congratulations he has received, Siminiani points out that he has been excited by “the large number of people who saw the gala” and confesses that he received messages from people he had not seen “for 15, 20 or 30 years”.

However, he highlights “a specific message”, that of one of the “teachers” who have “illuminated the way” for him, Josep María Català. “He wrote me a very affectionate message and somehow, having that blessing from him makes me very excited,” he says.

Towards “Reconstruction”

From this surprise and cold, Siminiani believes that the award can help him promote “a more ambitious project in terms of budget and duration.”

“I think it can be a good tool to establish the type of language and proposal that the short displays and on which I want to continue working,” he advances.

Of the various proposals that he has “in mind”, Siminiani highlights “Reconstruction”, a feature film project in which he intends to put the reconstruction of cities after their destruction in World War II and the Spanish Civil War at the center.

What is the architecture of Europe?

In this new project, which is still in the research phase, the director will try to reflect “everything that happened in Europe at an architectural level” and the societies that were formed.

“I believe that architecture is the depositary of our history and many times of many of our personal configurations”, he adds.

From there, following in the wake of “Emotional Architecture 1959”, it will tell a “human” story making use of a similar cinematographic language, such as voice-over, the use of archive images or the narrative style in the form of a documentary. .

The memory of movie theaters

During his speech last Saturday at the Goya gala, held in Seville, the director remembered the movie theaters where he spent his childhood, now disappeared, in his hometown, Santander (Costa and Capitol), and Murcia (Floridablanca and Rex), where he moved at the age of eleven.

“It makes me very sad to see how in the smallest cities the cinemas have been disappearing from the urban area and, either they have disappeared or they have moved to shopping centers on the periphery,” he laments.

Of those cinemas that he frequented, he affirms that “he went a lot for school” and because his parents took him on Saturdays and, although he admits that he also enjoys the new spaces and new theaters, he defines himself as “a great defender of the liturgy of the cinema”. “For me it’s beyond the movies themselves,” he says.

Pablo Ayerbe Caselles