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Underground Spirit Award of the Palić European Film Festival to María Cañas

13.06.2023.

Spanish multimedia artist María Cañas is this year's laureate of the Underground Spirit Award, assigned by the Palić European Film Festival for exceptional work in the field of independent film, as well as for the unique approach to film language and an authentic author's poetics built off the mainstream film industry. Arrival of María Cañas at EFF Palić is supported through the artist mobility program within the PICE fund of the Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) organization.

María Cañas (Seville, 1972) is a Spanish multimedia artist whose work is charged with irony with a dominant critical and contradictory sense in her installations and videos touching the limits between fiction and reality. She works with recordings and collected audiovisual material that presents critical discourses related to collective notions about traditions, stereotypes or genders, using classical and experimental film, found footage technique and numerous resources that characterize her transgressive, eclectic and ironic approach.

One of the most controversial installations of the artist is «The inheritance substance», created in collaboration with Juan Romero and exhibited in 1999 in the space «Emerging area» of the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC), in which artists proposed a reflection on exclusive nationalisms and their symbols. Another emblematic work is Sé villana (La Sevilla del Diablo) from 2013, where the artist confronts the contradictory relationship she maintains with her hometown through, in her words, “an incisive and grotesque journey through the essence of Seville in its most deeply rooted traditions and its extravagant derivations that pays homage to the people not only as a quarry of folkloric materials but also as the authentic protagonist of history ”. Sé villana is projected in the first room of the LAUGHS IN THE DARK exhibition together with Holy Thriller (2011), where the unlikely encounter between Michael Jackson and a brother band of Easter takes place.

The CAAC of Seville co-produced four new works, among them the video installation of three channels Risas en la Obscura (2015), a tribute to the cinematographic archetypes of independent women who rebel against the established and show their power through laughter; and La mano que trina (2015), a satire on the new “religion of the selfie” and other pathologies related to the digitization of today’s society. She was the director of Animalario TVProducciones, a platform for experimental audiovisual art that explores different ways of creation such as music videos, video art, digital painting, installations and internet projects.

The Homage program at the Abazija cinema is dedicated to the Award Laureate, where selection of short films made in the last ten years will be screened. The Underground Spirit Award, established in 2008, has so far been assigned to F.J. Osan, German director Uli M. Schüppel, local director Želimir Žilnik, Norwegian Joern Utkilen, Swedish directorial tandem Ol Simonson and Johan S. Nilsson, French animator Edouard Salier, Hungarian super-8 duo - Bukharov Brothers, artistic group which the British film magazine Sight & Sound called "Electric Riders of the Apocalypse", and the Yugoslav and Slovenian directors of photography and director, one of the founders of the black wave Karpo Godina, French animator, director and visual artist Bertrand Mandico, Italian director and screenwriter Tizza Covi and Austrian director and photographer Rainer Frimmel, French director Jean Charles I, Italian director and editor Sara Fgaier, Romanian producer Ada Solomon, and last year’s laureate Swedish cinematographer and director of photography István Borbás.

The 30th jubilee edition of the Palić European Film Festival, organized by the Open University Subotica, takes place from July 15 to 21, 2023, in Palić and Subotica, while the rich pre-festival program begins on the first day of July. At this year's Festival edition, over 150 film professionals from the country and abroad are expected, and in addition to the rich film program, the audience will be able to enjoy numerous dynamic accompanying programs - concerts, exhibitions, book promotions, workshops and master classes.