Spain’s San Sebastian Festival, the highest-profile event in the Spanish-speaking world, is opening another industry front as it also turns more towards Europe to launch Glocal in Progress.
A meet-mart for movies made in Europe but not in one of its big-five market languages – English. French, Spanish, Italian and German – Glocal in Progress kicks off this September with the presence at San Sebastian’s 5th Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum of delegations from Norway, Iceland and Denmark under the banner of a Focus on Glocal Cinemas.
Glocal in Progress will Alpha-launch in 2017 with a work-in-progress screening of movies in post-production made in non-dominant European languages. Screenings will be along the lines of the highly-popular San Sebastian-Toulouse Films in Progress, launched in 2002, focusing on Latin American pix in post, and firmly established as one of the main industry draws at the San Sebastian Festival.
Impelled by the Basque government, the new initiative rolls off a growth phenomenon in Europe: the build of national and local film industries in its medium-sized or smaller territories. Film industries in countries outside Europe’s “big five” markets have established sizeable domestic market shares: Danish movies took 30% of total box office in Denmark last year, for instance, Norwegian movies a 20.5% domestic market share. Production levels, though not necessarily rising this decade, are often not insignificant: Iceland produced 14 films in 2015, Estonia 25, the Netherlands 82.
Popular on Variety
As part of this building phenomenon, Basque movies have passed several milestones in recent years, such as a first-ever San Sebastian competition berth for a Basque-language title with women’s relationship drama “Loreak” (“Flowers”) in 2014, which was acquired for international sales by Film Factory, one of the biggest sales companies in the Spanish-speaking world.
Positioning its film industry as part of a modern European industry, the Basque government has pushed over recent years to strengthen its international reach and links with its natural counterparts in the rest of Europe. Glocal Films in Progress is in part one result, building on a meeting held at last year’s San Sebastian Festival with heads of film-TV agencies from 15 European countries. This led to the signing of a manifesto, Glocal Cinemas: Big Stories, Small Countries.
Producers at this year’s Focus on Glocal Cinema will be able to present projects linked in some way to Latin America. Movies screening at Glocal in Progress from in 2017 require no such connection.
“If the link with Latin America was born from a common language, Spanish, in Glocal it is a different language, Basque, that connects us to other countries,” said San Sebastian director Jose Luis Rebordinos.
Glocal is “an open window for the internationalisation of films in the Basque language,” “the commitment to telling global stories in local languages,” and “the affirmation of Europe’s cultural and linguistic diversity,” emphasised Joxean Muñoz, the Basque government’s deputy culture minister.
