Urtasun announces the BIC declaration of the Official School of Cinematography Collection

The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun announced this Thursday the declaration as an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) of the Collection of the Official School of Cinematography.

“This is the figure that guarantees the most complete protection and for the first time it will be applied to a cinematographic collection. We had never done this before and we are doing it for the first time with the beginning of these procedures“said the minister at an event at the Spanish Film Library, where he inaugurated the exhibition ‘The 100 Free Meters: Life and Miracles of the Film School (1947-1976)’.

Urtasun has indicated that the objective is for the collection to officially be a BIC by mid-2025 and has stressed that the film archive has great value, since it contains 1,750 audiovisual productions.

“The film and documentary archive of this school is one of the most complete kept by our Spanish Film Archive. With this we want to send the message that Spanish cinema is one of the great cultural heritages of our country.“, he stated.

Likewise, the minister considers that this declaration is a “historical debt” that Spain has with the audiovisual heritage and opens the possibility of future protections of other assets of a similar type. “We are going to continue protecting, disseminating and promoting the value of our cinematographic and audiovisual heritage. And we are going to continue recovering a cultural memory that almost half a century of dictatorship failed to erase,” he stressed.

Urtasun attended the opening of the exhibition ‘The 100 meters freestyle: Life and miracles of the Film School (1947-1976)‘, which is part of the celebration of Spanish Cinema Day on October 6, which will include other activities such as the screening at the Cine Doré (Madrid) of three film restoration works, including the revival of the restoration of ‘Esa happy couple’, by Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga.

Through the Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA), Culture has also prepared the ‘Day of reflection on the present and future of cinema’which will take place on Monday, October 7 at the Cine Doré. The initiative proposes three thematic tables, in which different professionals, entities and agents from the sector will participate: ‘Challenges and opportunities of the State Council of Cinema and Audiovisual Culture’, ‘New challenges of the film industry (production, distribution, exhibition) ‘ and ‘Cinema and audiovisuals as part of the Spanish historical heritage, a challenge for the future’.

As a novelty for this edition, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food have joined forces to extend Spanish Cinema Day to rural Spain. The program ‘Extended Spanish Cinema Day’ It will take the fourth celebration of the anniversary to 300 locations without projection rooms spread across the 17 autonomous communities. On the billboard there will be a dozen recent films from Spanish cinema, most directed by women filmmakers, such as ‘El agua’ by Elena López Riera, ‘Un amor’ by Isabel Coixet or ‘Secaderos’ by Rocío Mesa.

EXHIBITION

The exhibition ‘The 100 meter freestyle: Life and miracles of the Film School (1947-1976)’ is a way to recognize filmmakers who tried to “exercise their freedom to film, produce, write scripts and tell their own stories.” “A collective effort to circumvent censorship and impositions, which has marked the cultural history of our country and opened a door to modernity and the place of our cinema in the world,” he commented.

The exhibition can be visited from this Thursday until next April 27. Urtasun has toured the exhibition with the curator, Asier Aranzubia, and two of the school’s graduates, Cecilia Bartolomé and Jaime Chávarri.

The title, ‘The 100 meter freestyle. Life and miracles of the Film School (1947-1976)’, refers to the way in which the Directing students referred to an exercise in which they were given said meters of film (barely three minutes long) so that they could manage to tell a story.

The minister thanked the commissioner for his “phenomenal” work and noted that it was very exciting to be able to visit her with Cecilia Bartolomé and Jaime Chávarri. “It’s a brutal job”Urtasun pointed out.