Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE).- The eighth edition of the Atlantic Festival of the Black Genre ‘Tenerife Noir’ has started this Thursday with an extensive program, which among its highlights will have the assistance of Sergio Ramírez, 2017 Cervantes Award winner, and a tribute to Alexis Ravelo.
The theme this year will be the State as a character in the noir-criminal genre, hence the presence of the Hispanic-Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez, who, in addition to participating in a debate on crime novels as a complaint resource, will receive the Black Prize on Saturday, March 18, and Criminal who delivers this pageant.
Other invited writers are Amir Valle, a Cuban writer based in Berlin, and Romain Slocombe, finalist in the prestigious Prix Goncourt 2016 with his ‘Trilogy of the Collaborators’ in the framework of World War II, the director of Tenerife Noir, Alejandro Martin Perera.
Martín, who was accompanied at the event by the mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, José Manuel Bermúdez, and the vice-rector for Culture of the University of La Laguna, Juan Albino Méndez, stressed that the figure and work of Alexis Ravelo will be the another thematic axis of this eighth edition of the festival.
Ravelo will be honored at the International Black Gender Research Seminar and at the Antonio Lozano Cultural Chair of Criminal Gender at the University of La Laguna, “which he appreciated so much and in which he regularly participated.”
In addition, the official section of express cinema, which for a few days will turn Santa Cruz into a film set for short films, will have among its requirements that the works submitted to the competition must be based on one of the works of the writer from Gran Canaria, “a master in portraying inequality and corruption”.
In any case, the director of the festival stressed, “the best tribute” that can be paid to Alexis Ravelo “is to read and reread his work and recommend it to the new generations.”
Alejandro Martín has highlighted some of the main milestones of the contest, such as the international section of shorts and medium-length films, to which 111 projects have been submitted, some from Iran, India, the United States, Peru and France, of which the jury will select five for your screening.
There will also be novelties this year, such as the so-called ‘Noir Film Fest’, focused on the production, marketing and adaptation of texts, series and films, or a concert by the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Municipal Music Band of movie soundtracks. black on the 16th at the La Recova Art Center.
Until March 26, Tenerife Noir’s programming will include screenings of classics such as ‘Los Bribed’ and From Russia with love’, or the recent hit ‘Cerdita’; talks-conferences, plays, street exhibitions, role-playing games and videogames and the VII International Seminar on research in the noir genre.
This last activity will take place at the Guajara Campus of the University of La Laguna and will pay tribute to another of the recently deceased national figures of the genre, the Galician Domingo Villar.
The Tenerife Noir program will be distributed throughout various spaces in Santa Cruz-Casa Siliuto, Guimerá Theater, La Recova Art Center, El Corte Inglés Cultural Area, House of Culture and Museum of Fine Arts- and other municipalities on the island, such as La Laguna -ULL-, Tacoronte -Casa de la Cultura- or El Rosario, in this case to the Tenerife II prison, where a recital of ‘unsubmissive poems’ will take place with piano accompaniment under the motto ‘Insurgent Melody’.
In addition, the Casa José Saramago, in Tías (Lanzarote), will be the scene of a meeting on crime novels with the participation of Víctor del Árbol, Esther García, Andreu Martín and José Luis Correa.
The mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, José Manuel Bermúdez, has expressed “the pride” of the city in hosting the bulk of the activities of this festival, “one of the most important in Spain” of the noir genre, and which contributes to projecting its image in the media and discussion forums at a national level.
Bermúdez has also celebrated that Alexis Ravelo receives “a well-deserved tribute” in this contest, in the same way that the vice-rector for Culture of the ULL, Juan Albino Méndez, whose loss has produced “a sensation of orphanhood” being as he was “one of the leading figures” of the genre. EFE
