The eighth edition of the SACO (Oviedo Contemporary Audiovisual Week) kicks off on Friday 11 March and will wrap on the 20^th. Over the course of the event, there will be slots reserved for screenings accompanied by live music, audiovisual installations and guided tours with a distinct whiff of celluloid. We talked about all of this with its director, Pablo de María Díaz, as detailed below.

Cineuropa: What is SACO? How does one prepare oneself before attending? Is it any different from other festivals?
Pablo de María Díaz: That’s what we strive for! The best way to prepare is to come along without any preconceived notions, to have a desire to let yourself be surprised and to get to know a selection that – we believe – is different. Or at least it aspires and attempts to be different through programmes that have been created in an original manner, by and from us. In other words, part of our programme is made up of projects that are born here right from their very concept, and which are developed, produced and can be enjoyed here, as is the case for “Plano Sonoro” [lit. “Sound Layer”], “El sonido del arte” [lit. “The Sound of Art”] and a few of the films screened to live music. That mixture of activities, workshops, discussions, courses, video installations and so on, coupled with film screenings, is what gives SACO its character. Our personality is dictated by the format, more so than by being a film festival that restricts itself to a geographical or thematic area. What makes us different is more to do with the form – we like to play with the form of the offerings.

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It’s a form shaped by the merging of different arts, correct? Because you mix music and film, for example, thus giving them a new format.
That’s the idea. We started eight years ago, step by step, and over time, we’ve developed other programmes that run in parallel with the ten days of SACO, such as the Radar and Cine a la luz de la luna [lit. “Film by Moonlight”] ones, where the programming of films has gained more prominence. The space at SACO has been transformed into a place where we go beyond the mere programming of films: we have a very strong relationship with the Asturias Fine Arts Museum, with a fabulous area where Cristina Álvarez and Adrián Martín are going to create their video essays to show the audience a different way of perceiving, thinking about and watching cinema. They are taking well-known titles and contrasting them with other movies, triggering a new discourse that enriches the traditional discourse of screenings. This is the path we have been treading over the last few years, and which we want to consolidate: it involves fusion, change, the transformation of things and provocation. For instance, this year, we are inviting artists who are not filmmakers – people like painter Hugo Fontela, author Ángeles Caso and musician Rodrigo Cuevas – to shoot a scene: this is the first time they have tackled the thought process behind how to film something. We’re particularly interested in that: stripping artists and their offerings of their context in order to give them a different form.

I assume that it takes time to get them off the ground: perhaps right now, you might be setting in motion audiovisual projects that will be showcased at the SACO in one, two or maybe even three years’ time…
Of course, a lot of the time, these kinds of propositions take more than one year to make. It has happened to us before with one or two music groups, when we suggested the possibility of doing a screening to live music, which we spent months working on with some, but entire years with others, until we found the features that were a match for their spirit. We always have windows open for the coming years. We prefer to do it calmly and invest as much care and affection in it as possible. Those initiatives that break with the concept of a traditional screen to a certain extent are the ones that we really want to explore, and we also seek out those films that have trouble getting a slot on the commercial circuit, and always show them on the big screen: at this edition, we have titles of the likes of Memoria [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film], Rendir los machos [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film] and Flee [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Jonas Poher Rasmussen
fiche film], among others.

It’s a versatile festival, then…
We try to make it versatile: the initial impulse for it all was to bring spectacles to Oviedo that hadn’t reached the area before. And then, also, to actually create them here, with local artists. There’s a great pool of talent in Asturias, and sometimes what’s lacking is someone to spur it on and provoke, fishing it out of the ordinary so that novel propositions can rear their heads. I suppose we’ve achieved this a few times so far.