ShortMetraje: New Spanish Shorts

Screening introduced by Martín Rosete, director of Voice Over.

ShortMetraje comes back full force, this time celebrating its 10-year anniversary. This edition's fantastic line-up includes a wide array of formats, genres, and styles by a group of emerging filmmakers whose talents will shape the future of Spanish cinema.

Featured shorts include the insightful documentary A Story of the Modlins; The Machine Man, an artistic reflection on the machine man in the 21st Century; Voice Over, a poetic, original, and heartwarming dream of a short;  Voltereta, a coming-of-age story set in 1980's New York City; the serious human rights drama That Wasn't Me; and The Last Sequence, a fun story about the other side of the camera. Previous editions have brought you films by Nacho Vigalondo, Daniel Sánchez Arévalo and Julio Medem. Be the first to discover tomorrow's most acclaimed filmmakers! This program is presented by Pragda (www.pragda.com).

A Story For the Modlins/Una historia para los modlin 
Sergio Oksman | 2012 | Spain | 26m
After appearing in the film Rosemary's Baby by Roman Polanski, Elmer Modlin ran away with his family to a distant land, where they shut themselves inside a dark apartment for 30 years.

That Wasn’t Me/Aquel no era yo
Esteban Crespo | 2012 | Spain| 20m 
Being a soldier is not difficult: either you get used to it or they kill you. The hardest thing is getting used to living with your memories and being yourself again after doing what you have done.

Voltereta
Alexis Morante | 2011 | USA | 13m
Lolo is an Andalusian 10-year-old kid who moves to New York City with all his family. We are in 1985 and Lolo only knows about America from the movies he watched in his neighborhood cinema: “Back to the Future”, “The Goonies” or “Karate Kid”. Today Lolo and his grandma decide to go down to their communal swimming pool in New York. But something unexpected will make Lolo, as young as 10 years old, to confront all his fears at a time. Because sometimes a simple decision can change the rest of your life.

Machine Man/Hombre máquina
Alfonso Moral and Roser Corella | 2011 | Spain/Bangladesh | 15m
Dhaka, Bangladesh. Barefoot women collect coal. Boys produce 18,000 bricks a day. A man weighing 50 kilos moves 100-kilo sacks. Children sort plastic bottles for 12 hours each day. Men dismantle rusty wrecks in a polluted river. When they speak of the work that destroys their health, which in Europe would be considered inhumane, they say, “I feel like a machine.” Despite the plethora of modern machinery available in the 21st century, this film captures people still performing back-breaking and often dangerous work by hand.

The Last Sequence/La última secuencia
Arturo Ruiz Serrano | 2011 | Spain | 13m
The late 1960s. In the Almería desert, a Spanish-Italian co-production is being filmed. The lack of resources and poor communication among the different members of the crew are on verge of running the end of the film. They might just be saved by one shot/scene..

Voice Over
Martín Rosete | 2012 | Spain | 10m
I-won’t-tell-you-whose voiceover guides us through three extreme situations which are actually the same. Will you survive?