Cinema, Stories and SmartPhones

If you want to live other stories or travel to incredible and distant worlds, despite the difficult times that we have had to live, you can always go to a movie theater, enjoy a magnificent movie on a big screen and forget for a while about all the troubles that haunt the world. It is a wonderful time machine that, in addition to entertaining, benefits our physical and mental health.

This unique and unrepeatable experience is undergoing a real revolution in recent times, because new technologies have modified our consumption habits, and now we have many other ways of enjoying movies, surely in a different way, such as watching the cinema at home. on a Smart TV, on your computer or on a mobile phone sunbathing on the beach.

Also the new generations of filmmakers have rebelled against the industry and no longer want or cannot mortgage their lives to do what they like the most: tell stories through cinema, and that is why they do not hesitate to use all the tools they have to its reach, such as a Smartphone, to be able to create audiovisual content as a means of expression and to be able to communicate with its followers using the new media that the Internet allows us.

Film festivals have a responsibility, to the extent that it corresponds to us, to be the loudspeaker of all these new media. Surely not all of us will think the same, but that is not the important thing, because in the end a movie is still a movie, even if you see it on a mobile phone.

In this 19th edition, in addition to continuing with the hybrid format and maintaining the usual competitions, we want to welcome these new ways of making films, and we have invited cinePhone.es, a film festival made with mobile phones, to show their best short films. We have also selected one of the first feature films made entirely with an iPhone by an already established filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh (“Disturbed”), and thus be able to verify that telling stories is above any technical conditioning. In addition, we are going to present a new contest for Schools of Image and Sound from all over Spain, thanks to the collaboration of the interns of the Integrated Training Center of Ponferrada.

On the other hand, thank the 46 people from the different selection committees, who have helped us to program an excellent selection of films and especially the 18 members of the professional Jury who this year will be in charge of awarding the Retina awards.

Thank you all for continuing to trust “Mi Retina me Engaña”.

ANTONIO DONÍS

DIRECTOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF PONFERRADA