Educational sessions for schools

General Information

Dates: 25-29/11
Time: 11:00–13:30
Venue: CIC El Almacén

Description of the programme

Over the last few decades it has become increasingly more evident that audiovisual culture is leaving behind oral culture and written text, when not completely transcending them. People read and write less and less all the time, as one can see in recent years with the slow but steady displacement of blogs and digital platforms like Facebook towards Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram. We are living at a time when images make up, define and structure everyday reality and life: photographs, selfies, shared videos and emoticons are much more important when it comes to creating bonds and outlining positions than intellectual discourses or long discussions.

And, nevertheless, however much it might seem to the contrary, images do indeed have an intention, a goal, a purpose or a particular interest. Every image regulates, delimits and enables certain truths and possibilities. The expansion of emoticons as a way of conveying affects, for instance, ends up actually defining human relationships; videos created to sway voters or to channel public opinion in one direction or another are a radical example of different ways of understanding power.

Consequently, it is of pressing urgency for school education to ensure that, as a basic element in the exercise of freedom, students have a profound knowledge of images and their meanings, their forms and their intentions. In other words, a kind of literacy in images for a new generation. With this goal in mind, Muestra de Cine de Lanzarote is collaborating again this year with the film director Nayra Sanz Fuentes to help various groups of secondary school students in Lanzarote and in Fuerteventura to understand the complexity intrinsic to the whole world of the image. These groups will visit the El Almacén Cultural Research Centre, watch one of the films from the festival and analyse it in a collective debate, a basic skill in a time like ours.

Responsible for the Sessions

Nayra Sanz Fuentes is a film director, scriptwriter, editor and producer who graduated with a degree in Spanish Philology, majoring in contemporary literature. She went on to take a Master in Advanced Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin thanks to a scholarship from DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service. Her field of study focused on the national-socialist body through the work of the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Afterwards she took a Master in Film Directing in New York, where she lived for two years and started to work on film productions.

On returning to Spain she set up a production company called Rinoceronte Films, whose mission is to produce films and develop cultural projects. At the moment, her filmography contains seven fiction and non-fiction shorts: Selfie (2019), In Those Lands (2018), Sub Terrae (2017), Just Another Day (2014), Things in Common (2011), Encounter (2010) and Anniversary (2009). Overall, they have been screened at more than 200 film festivals worldwide and have won several awards including the Caracola Alcances prize at the Cadiz Documentary Film Festival, the Edward Snowden prize and the Miradas Doc Award, among others.

Her first feature-length film, As Old as the World (2012), won the Círculo Precolombino de Oro at the 29th International Film Festival of Bogotá and has also been screened at many other festivals and in cultural centres and universities.

She has also worked as unit production manager and editor for the documentary film Edificio España (2014), nominated for the Goya Awards in 2015, and as co-producer and co-scriptwriter for The Hidden City (2018), both directed by Víctor Moreno. At once, she is a former programmer for Ciclo Docma at Matadero Madrid and has also lectured at the Master in Documentary Film at the LENS School of Visual Arts in Madrid.