Adrian Arias | Castromonte (Valladolid) (EFE).- The rural world as a stage and daily life elevated to art is the present that ties together ‘Lazos’, a decentralized film festival that delves into our roots as a people in search of the roots that connect us with our ancestors.
In the heart of Montes Torozos, outstanding among the Castilian plateau, is Castromonte, a small municipality in Valladolid with just 300 inhabitants that will host the second edition of the ‘Lazos’ festival from June 28 to July 2, which seeks to establish itself as a “reference of the decentralized and rural cinema” in Spain, as its co-director and member of Moraleja Films, Enrique García-Vázquez, explained in an interview with EFE.
A total of fifteen films, three feature films and twelve ‘shorts’, will make up a second edition that has taken a “great leap in quality and quantity” compared to last year, thanks to the “good reception” received by a first event called the attention of institutions and sponsors.
Cinema as a generational ‘tie’
As a bond that unites and adorns a gift, this festival directs its frame to the gift that past generations bequeath. Values such as work, effort and perseverance, represented in the hard trades of our ancestors, many of them in danger of extinction, as the festival warns in its ‘Ofizios’ section.
“It is essential to bear in mind where we come from so as not to lose our identity and thus not fall into an atrocious individualism that turns us into mere consumers,” warns García-Vázquez, who points out that this festival seeks to give a new role to cultural heritage and tradition for that it is not just an “old relic”.
Precisely, the irruption of new technologies has opened a generational gap unparalleled in the history of humanity, hence the cinema rises as that “generational glue”, as a “universal art that excites and reaches both grandparents and children and grandchildren”.
A bowling alley, a tattoo artist, an ethnographer and a Community Manager
Under this leitmotiv of understanding tradition and cultural legacy as something alive, ‘Lazos’ will also sit face to face in various workshops with professionals from worlds apparently as disparate as a bowling alley and a tattoo artist or an ethnographer like Joaquín Díaz with the Community Manager Teresa Gigosos.
“For us, culture is the renewal of our stories, of our being. Everything”, says the co-director, who explains how as a result of the pandemic, many young people, like them, decided to take a radical turn in their lives and flee from what society had always imposed on them as a goal: “Return to people is an act of revolution”, he confesses.
According to the filmmaker, the covid has made many people reconnect with their roots. Especially when “we found ourselves locked in a small apartment without being able to work and paying very high rents.” “It has been the piece that has made all the others fall and that we have asked ourselves: Who am I?”
Empty Spain as a cinematographic claim
The eternal debate about series and film platforms is not alien to alternative productions that have their screening at festivals such as ‘Lazos’, since they act as a “double-edged sword”, since they either overshadow you or in at a given moment they “elevate” you.
For this reason, despite the fact that Moraleja Films calls for cinema as a meeting place where one decides to go, compared to the platforms that “force” you to consume “what they want”, García-Vázquez believes that this paradigm it is being corrected thanks to rural productions that have been a box office success such as ‘As bestas’ or ‘Irati’.
That is why the filmmaker calls for turning rural and empty Spain into a “film claim”, because “people are interested in what happens here”, and all that remains is that the production companies, the administrations and the cinema understand that in the rural world and in its people there are also movie stories. EFE