The expression “on the run” is part of a maddening Seminci where auteur cinema reigns, while developing numerous and very interesting activities that the accredited press does not allow. But the public of a city well connected to the festival does so: the halls are filling up. The preferential passes for criticism, to Calderón, Cervantes and Carrión, denote it. Yesterday was the day of Spanish cinema “which occupies a privileged place in the festival’s program”, as reported by the daily magazine of the event, with its brooch during the ceremony of awarding the Pointes d’Honneur to the actress Victoria Abril, directors Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón and Fernando Colomo and producer Andrés Vicente Gómez.

At the same time, the official received the remarkable debut of the Valencian Avelina Prat (veteran script in more than thirty feature films) with the dramatic comedy Vasil on its own script and real case. Prat’s own father, who lived alone and very alone, decided to welcome a Bulgarian immigrant into his home, who in the film is dressed by the same actor Ivan Barnev, while the father is Karra Elejalde, with Alexandra Jiménez as alter ego of the director. Much will change the lives of those who know him, while he brings to light quite a few contradictions, and even the Kafkaesque bureaucratic wall that fools face. Formally academic, without the stumbles of arrogance of (almost) all early films, it admits slight gripes in the limited newness of subject matter, a few things left unsaid, and an excess of Frank Capra-like kindness. Now it’s one of those they love. It opens on Friday, November 4.

The one that still does not have a Spanish distributor is the very solid Pamfir, the first feature film by Ukrainian director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk (1983), which was seen at the Cannes Fortnight. Had this been done before Putin’s clumsy invasion of the country, it might have mitigated the devastating third degree of systemic corruption in the country, here on the border with Romania. Contraband abounds in this city, which the mother of the family justifies by declaring that “for some it is a crime and for others it is a means of earning a living”. With an academic background (a degree in philosophy and a degree in architecture, as well as theater, cinema and television at Kyiv National University), its author offers an elaborate multi-genre artifact (western, drama, Thriller in French…) resolved with elaborate sequence shots, most often at night or interiors, with good photo work, foundry and artistic direction. The protagonist is an almost chimerical anti-hero, with an upright moral code and obsessed with guiding his son on the right path, knowing his utopia. Suggestive notes on matriarchy put the icing on an awards-worthy film.