It is important to stress the importance of festivals of this kind in the current climate in Barcelona and indeed the whole of Spain. The budgetary cuts of recent years have had a drastic effect on culture, with a damaging impact on the programming of well-known museums, even leading to the closure of some of the most active centres, for example Can Xalant. In this context, an independent festival also serves to generate reflection and critical debate through the films shown, which at this year's event fall into two categories: feature films (fiction and non-fiction) and shorts (fiction, non-fiction and animation).
Cinema is a great platform for communication, in which new and traditional technologies mix to present fictional or animated stories that are as diverse as they are interesting, recalling a conversation between Vicente Molina Foix and Susan Sontag, in which Sontag remarks: "...what kind of films are we talking about? [...] Making films is easy with all the new technologies available to us today. I'm thinking about the portability and low cost of video cameras. I think it's naïve to want to make difficult and sophisticated films and then get depressed because they don't reach a wide audience. But if you want to reach a serious audience that will really appreciate your art, there are plenty of alternative distribution options."
Visitors to the festival will find various techniques, issues and realities enhanced by different viewpoints
L'Alternativa 2012 Independent Film Festival
CCCB, Filmoteca de Catalunya, French Institute, Casa Amèrica Catalunya
Barcelona