1,840 moviegoers at Punto de Vista Seminar 2014

The 2nd Punto de Vista Seminar has come to a close, and the 11 screenings open to the public have been a huge success in terms of the number of attendees. A remarkable fact for the Punto de Vista Festival, which is coming back next year in February. As many as 1,840 moviegoers attended the sessions at the Navarra Film Library and the Saide Carlos III movie theatre complex, that is, an average audience of 150 at the former and of 248 at the latter. The morning sessions, focusing on the films by Ignacio Agüero and Pema Tseden, were attended by the 128 people who had registered for them.

Punto de Vista has thus achieved the goal of sharing knowledge of film, encouraging discussion and screening films that are rarely shown to the wider audience. Attendees made a variegated, heterogeneous lot, comprising the people registered for the seminar, film students and trade members (many of them Festival regulars), and a high number of citizens from Pamplona and Navarra at large. With this, Punto de Vista continues to strengthen its position as a meeting point to discuss film, woven into the city’s social fabric.

In addition, the Festival brought together two filmmakers from distant places: Ignacio Agüero (Chile) and Pema Tseden (Tibet). Meeting at the seminar, they found similarities between their films and began to cement ties for future joint projects. The two directors also shared experiences with the seminar attendees. Agüero, for instance, told them his films began with an image: ‘Topics have never been my gateway to the real world; instead, I prefer images or concrete situations. Topics emerge only later,’ he said in an interview with Diario de Navarra. The most important thing, he added, is search: ‘Filmmaking is an experience in knowledge. What I like in films is people involved in a search process’ (Diario de Noticias, 19 February 2014).
Pema Tseden was categorical: ‘Filmmaking is a mission in life’ (Diario de Navarra, 20 February 2014). In 2002, Tseden entered the world of films, which he combines with his literary career: ‘I felt I had the responsibility to do my best to depict life in Tibet. People really don’t know the first thing about us. This is why my films feature my people, speaking my own language.’

Besides introducing these two directors, Punto de Vista held the 5th X Films Project, screening the winning film of last year’s edition, Francina Verdés’s La casa de mi padre, and selecting the film project to be shot this year: Aitor Gametxo’s El otro mapa de Abauntz. The film by Verdés will soon begin its tour of film festivals, while Gametxo is now planning his shooting, for the film is to be ready by February 2015, on the occasion of the 9th Punto de Vista Film Festival. The starting point of El otro mapa de Abauntz is the finding of the oldest map in Europe in 2009: a 13,000-year-old drawing carved on a stone in the cave of Abauntz, in Ultzama. Based on this finding, the film then draws ‘a different, contemporary map of the valley, its landscapes and its people.’