13/06/2005

Elísio Cabral de Oliveira, President of the ICAM (Cinema, Audiovisual and Multimedia Institute) announced last week the institute’s intention of increasing the promotion of Portuguese production to Spanish distributors with the aim of reducing the deep gap between the Iberian Peninsula countries.
The objective was announced at the end of the gathering of Portuguese, Spanish and Brazilian producers and distributors organised in Lisbon by the ICAM in cooperation with the ICAA (Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales). The meeting took place in parallel with Spanish Film Week, which screened, among others, the latest films by Benito Zambrano (Habana Blues [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) and by Carlos Saura (El 7° Dia), in the presence both two filmmakers.
During the meeting, the Spanish distributors admitted the extent to which the Spanish market ignores Portuguese production. And so, ICAM’s strategic goal is to favour the relationship between Spain and Brazil and bring to Portugal distributors from those countries and screen the latest national productions, annually: an idea which seems to be based on the London UK Film Focus, which will take place between the 27th and the 30th of June.

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This initiative comes at a time when the theory is about to become reality with all three countries involved in pre-production of Fados Carlos Saura’s new project co-produced by Fado Filmes, Duvídeo, Continental Filmes, Zebra Producciones (the production society run by Antonio Saura) and VideoFilmes headed by Brazilian director Walter Salles. Carlos Saura, who was in Lisbon last week, presented the project at a press conference. Though the script is not yet completed, the 73 year old director confirmed it will neither be a fiction film, nor a straight-forward documentary. Fados, which will start shooting at the beginning of 2006, will be the final part of a trilogy made up Flamenco (1995) and Tango, Academy Award nominee for best foreign film in 1998.