The Oscar nominated film The Snow Society has been the great winner of this edition of the Platino Awards and its director, the Spanish Juan Antonio Bayona, took advantage of his speech to defend cinema and send a message to Argentina after the tribute dedicated to actress Cecilia Roth.
“My parents couldn't choose between studying and working. She started working at age 9 and he at 15. Therefore, they valued the education of her children. The first images of Argentine references that I remember are the films of Aristarain and Eliseo Subiela. We discussed his films a lot in film school. Cinema is a very powerful and fundamental tool of expression for a country. And to be against national cinema is to be against the country. So, Argentina, here we are. They are not alone. Above, the cinema of Argentina. “We are here to support you,” said the Spaniard.
The actress of Everything about my mother and figure of Latin American cinema was applauded when she went on stage to receive the honorary award given in previous editions to Antonio Banderas, Sonia Braga and Diego Luna. The muse of Fito Páez and Pedro Almodóvar looked excited and left the final minute to question Javier Milei.
“When I was little, I played with my brother Ariel, who is younger… I made up stories like how we were two astronauts traveling in a ship to Saturn, but something happened to us on the way… But before we started playing , he always told Ariel: 'We made it true.' We arrived at Saturn, I was dying because an invader shot me. Ariel would go crazy, because I was 'really dying' and I stopped breathing. So, he was going to look for our mother. And when he left, I took the opportunity to breathe, and when he came back, I stopped breathing again. I really 'was dead'. With this, what I mean is that for me that game turned into truth is cinema. “We built a parallel reality and in it we settled to tell the story of which we are part,” he declared in Xcaret in the Riviera Maya, where he was part of a demonstration in which actors and directors showed the albiceleste flag with the phrase 'United Argentine cinema '.
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“I need to say that we have to take care of our cinema,” he continued in his speech. “That our cinema is always in danger, in one country or the other. I believe that the Ibero-American community is a single cinema that speaks in Spanish and Portuguese. A single country. And then, when you have problems, you have to observe them, be attentive and help them. I am not asking for help, but for us all to be aware of the place we occupy in the world and that Spanish is a language that has to be heard just like other languages. It is not always heard. In our country, the problem is serious, it may cease to exist. Let us be attentive and resist. And like when I was a girl, I say: 'Let's turn that struggle, that belief and those dreams that we fear into truth, for that cinema that we make.'
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