SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 3 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The President of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, has guaranteed the Government’s support for MiradasDoc. “We are facing one of the most important international festivals that the Canary Islands have and I believe that an investment effort must be made and I take a much greater lesson, because it is excellent. This must be supported as it deserves because it gives us much more than what it receives through public investment,” said the president.
This was stated in statements to the media at the end of the institutional visit in which, accompanied by the president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Pedro Martín; The mayoress of Guía de Isora, Josefa Mesa, and the Minister of Economy of the regional cabinet, Elena Máñez, toured the different spaces in which the activities corresponding to the training and the MiradasDoc market were carried out this Friday, which she described as “excellent “.
“It has left me totally impressed. I congratulate the mayoress and the president of the Cabildo for having planted a seed 16 years ago that has grown in this magnificent way,” said Torres, who stressed that MiradasDoc is “one of the most important film festivals de Canarias”, which explains why the regional government guarantees the continuity of a cultural program that this Saturday closes its 16th edition.
The regional president was “absolutely convinced” of the importance of contributing public funds to culture, “a blessed uselessness”, he said, citing Oscar Wilde. “We have to make a greater effort than we are making, because it is clear that this also empowers the Canary Islands. The audiovisual sector has an excellent present and future, stressed Torres, while stating that MiradasDoc “is a fundamental commitment of the Guía City Council de Isora, the Cabildo de Tenerife and the Government of the Canary Islands”.
The words of the regional president were seconded by the insular president, Pedro Martín, who stressed that it is no coincidence that this project has achieved the meeting of 40 television stations from all over the world. “They wouldn’t come if this wasn’t a festival and an important market in which in the end they could get results,” he said without forgetting the importance of the training space for young Canarians and the creation of audiences “from below, with kids from school and institute , with an approach to reality that is different from what they usually have at home”.
For her part, the mayoress of Guía de Isora, Josefa Mesa, thanked both presidents for their visit, especially Torres, “for coming and wanting to know” the Festival, and Pedro Martín, “for being one of its defenders, he has experienced it from the beginning and has made efforts for it to arise and continue with the projection that the Festival has, which manages to combine what documentary cinema is, production and what it generates in the economy; the most important event that the Canary Islands have for documentary cinema” .
MARKET AND EDUCATION
During the institutional visit, which was also attended by the vice-president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Berta Pérez, and several members of the management team of the Support Program for the internationalization of Canarian companies, Proexca, Torres had the opportunity to hold a meeting informal with the public entities and private companies of the Archipelago that are part of the Audiovisual Cluster of the Canary Islands, who held a meeting to address the challenges of the audiovisual sector in the Islands.
Likewise, the Canarian president spoke with the Cuban filmmaker Rolando Díaz, coordinator of the Creation Documentary Development Laboratory (CREADOC) -program of the Canarian Institute for Cultural Development (ICDC) of the regional government and MiradasDoc- and the authors who write in it the script for five Canarian documentary film projects.
During his tour of the International Documentary Film Market -where Torres and his team were able to access the space for launching documentary projects specializing in Africa and the links between Africa and Latin America, the pitching of the AfroLatam Laboratory-, the president heard from the voice of those involved the keys that make the MiradasDoc market an international reference.
It is “an exceptional experience that offers very different perspectives from both continents”, according to the representative of the Austrian public television (ORF), Caroline Haidacher, and “a market without noise, which favors obtaining results”, according to the executive director of the DocMontevideo and Doc Sâo Paulo festivals, Luis Zaffaroni.
They also held a discussion with the Uruguayan filmmakers Carolina Campo Lupo and Guillermo Madeiro, director and editor of the film The Fable of the Turtle and the Flower, participants in the Debut WIP Editing Laboratory, which has allowed them to conclude their documentary thanks to the “particular look, not just any look” -in the words of Carolina Campo-, of a professional of the stature of the Sevillian publisher Manuel Muñoz.
Finally, the route through MiradasDoc led visitors to discover EnseñanDoc, the educational program for training audiences, which, at the Guía de Isora Auditorium, presents documentary films to primary and secondary schoolchildren in Tenerife and facilitates a discussion with its filmmakers or protagonists.
“We don’t know how to calibrate it. Today I have seen boys and girls for whom this experience may be the best they have seen or experienced in months,” said Torres, referring to the film ‘Animal Salvatge’, by the Catalan director María Besora, a story in which Janira, a three-year-old girl, maintains a special bond with animals and difficulties with human language.
