Spanish filmmaker
Montxo Armendariz
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Born
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1949-01-27
)
27 January 1949
(age 75)
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Other names
| Ramon Armendariz Barrios
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Occupation(s)
| Film director, screenwriter
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Years active
| 1974–present
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Montxo Armendariz
(born as
Juan Ramon Armendariz Barrios
; 27 January 1949 in Olleta,
Navarra
,
Spain
)
[1]
is a Spanish
film director
and
screenwriter
. His film
Las cartas de Alou
won at the
San Sebastian Film Festival
. His next film,
Stories from the Kronen
, an adaptation of the
novel of the same name
by
Jose Angel Manas
, was entered into the
1995 Cannes Film Festival
.
[2]
Secretos del corazon
won several
Goya Awards
, the Blue Angel Award at the
Berlin Film Festival
[3]
and received the
Academy Award
nomination for Best Foreign Film.
Early life and work
[
edit
]
Born on 27 January 1949 in Olleta,
Navarra
.
[4]
He was the last hope for his parents, who had already lost three baby sons.
[5]
His father was a farmhand and blacksmith and Armendariz spent his first year in rural
Basque Country
, a landscape that would reappear repeatedly in his filmography.
[5]
He was six years old when, in 1955, he moved with his parents to
Pamplona
in search of a better life.
[5]
At age eighteen, he discovered existentialism in the works of foreign authors. After completing his mandatory military service, he studied electronics, a subject he taught as university professor at the Instituto politecnico de Pamplona.
[6]
Interested in filmmaking, he joined a film club, studied folklore, wrote and performed protest songs and bought a
Super 8
camera to make his own short films. In 1975 he was arrested for protesting the killing of a Basque activist and faced trial on charges of conspiracy; this coincided with
Franco
's death and a subsequent amnesty was declared.
[7]
Eventually Armendariz left his teaching profession behind to follow a career as film director.
[8]
He joined Euskal Zinegille Elkartea, a new association of Basque filmmakers and made a series of documentary shorts on Basque topics including:
Barregarriaren Dantza
(Funny Dance)
(1979) and
Ikusmena
(Landscape)
(1980).
[8]
Ikusmena
presents a ten-year-old girl winning a prize in a school painting competition in a narrative disruptive by flashbacks that reveal how her artistic creativity had already been stifled by censorship and social pressures.
Ikusmena
was a success at festivals, but it suffered the inevitability limited distribution of short films.
[7]
Armendariz turned towards the more socially relevant documentary genre and made the eleventh episode in the Ikuska series:
La ribera de Navarra
(The Riberbanks of Navarre)
( 1981). This he followed with
Nafarrako Ikazkinack
in 1981
(The Charcoal workers of Navarre)
, a portrait of the hard life of charcoal burners. It was while making this project that the director met Tasio Ochoa, who inspired his first feature-length film.
[7]
Feature films
[
edit
]
Tasio
(1984), Armendariz's debut as full-length feature film director, traces the generational history of the title character, a charcoal burner in the
Urbasa
mountains, whose threaten way of life is detail in a series of elliptical sequences in a visual style that approximates
ethnographic cinema
. Produced by
Elias Querejeta
, who also worked on the screenplay, Tasio is played by three actors at different ages.
Tasio'
s realism demanded a three months shoot that involved the actors living and working in primitive conditions.
[9]
Tasio
won critical praise and placed Armendariz as an emerging talented director to be considered.
Two year later, he made his second film
27 Hours
(1986) which center in a group of youngsters in
San Sebastian
involved with by drug addiction and delinquency.
[10]
It was part of a popular trend of Spanish films focused in youth problems that it was falling out of favor by the time this film was released. Nevertheless
27 Hours
won the Silver Shell at the
San Sebastian International Film Festival
.
In 1990, Armendariz returned to the ethnographic style of his first film with:
Las Cartas de Alou
(Letters from Alou), a narrative that follows a Senegalese black young man who arrives in Spain as an illegal immigrant and has to confront personal and institutional discrimination.
[8]
Well received by film critics,
Las Cartas de Alou
won the Golden Shell as best film at the San Sebastian film festival and Armendariz received a
Goya Award
and the Spanish guild award of film writers in the original screenplay category.
Armendariz reached wide popular success with his third film
Stories from the Kronen
(1995), about alienated upper class young friends in
Madrid
, who regularly meet at the bar that gives the film its title.
[8]
It was adapted from a novel by Jose Angel Manas in an Elias Querejeta's production. The film, starring
Juan Diego Botto
and
Jordi Molla
, follows two close friends filling their summer vacation with sex, drugs and rock. The film became emblematic of the Spanish young generation of the 1990s.
Armendariz subsequent film became his best regarded artistic success
Secretos del Corazon
(Secrets of the Heart)
(1997). An intimist drama that centers on Javi, a nine-year-old boy who while visiting relatives in rural
Navarre
during the early 1960s discovers the world of the adults. The film reflected the director's own nostalgic views of his childhood in the Navarrese countryside, portraying with sensibility the growing up of the child.
[11]
Secretos del Corazon
received a number of awards and was Spain's candidate to the
Academy Awards
in the foreign language film category that year.
In 1999 Armendariz founded his own production company Oria films with Pui Oria.
[6]
Two years later he directed his next film
Silencio Roto
(Broken Silence), a story about
Maquis
, the guerilla fighters that confronted the Francoist forces in the aftermath of the
Spanish Civil War
.
[6]
The director's subsequent project was a return to his origins as a documentarist, making
Escenario Movil
(2004) which follows the itinerant life of a musician through different musical venues.
[6]
A year later Armendariz directed
Obaba
(2005), a fragmented tale based on the compilation of short stories book
Obabakoak
written by
Bernardo Atxaga
.
[6]
Armendariz most recent film
No tengas miedo
(Don't be afraid)
(2011) stars
Michelle Jenner
as Silvia a young woman confronting her past as an abused child.
At
Gijon International Film Festival
in 2011, he received the
Nacho Martinez Award
.
[12]
Filmography as director
[
edit
]
Notes
[
edit
]
- ^
Torres,
Diccionario Espasa Cine Espanol
p. 83
- ^
"Festival de Cannes: Stories from the Kronen"
.
festival-cannes.com
. Retrieved
2009-09-03
.
- ^
"Berlinale: 1997 Prize Winners"
.
berlinale.de
. Retrieved
2012-01-12
.
- ^
D’Lugo,
Guide to the Cinema of Spain
, p. 120
- ^
a
b
c
Stone,
Spanish Cinema
, p. 142
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
i
de Santiago, Pablo.
Filmografia de Montxo Armendariz: El Pasisaje de los Sentimientos.
decine21.com, (September 29, 2010). Retrieved March 24, 2012.
- ^
a
b
c
Stone,
Spanish Cinema
, p. 143
- ^
a
b
c
d
D’Lugo,
Guide to the Cinema of Spain
, p. 121
- ^
Stone,
Spanish Cinema
, p. 144
- ^
Torres,
Diccionario Espasa Cine Espanol
, p. 84
- ^
Stone,
Spanish Cinema
, p. 145
- ^
"Montxo Armendariz, awarded the National Cinematography Award "Nacho Martinez"
"
.
10 November 2011
. gijonfilmfestival.com
. Retrieved
22 August
2018
.
References
[
edit
]
- D'Lugo, Marvin.
Guide to the Cinema of Spain
. Greenwood Press, 1997.
ISBN
0313294747
- Stone, Rob.
Spanish Cinema
. Pearson Education, 2002,
ISBN
0-582-437156
- Torres, Augusto M.
Diccionario Espasa Cine Espanol
. Espasa Calpe, 1994,
ISBN
84-239-9203-9
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1980s
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1990s
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2000s
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2010s
|
- 2010:
Agusti Villaronga
- 2011: Angel de la Cruz, Ignacio Ferreras,
Paco Roca
, and Rosanna Cecchini
- 2012: Javier Barreira, Gorka Magallon, Ignacio del Moral, Jordi Gasull, and Neil Landau
- 2013:
Alejandro Hernandez
and
Mariano Barroso
- 2014:
Javier Fesser
, Claro Garcia, and Cristobal Ruiz
- 2015:
Fernando Leon de Aranoa
- 2016:
Alberto Rodriguez
and
Rafael Cobos
- 2017:
Isabel Coixet
- 2018:
Alvaro Brechner
- 2019:
Benito Zambrano
, Daniel Remon, and Pablo Remon
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2020s
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[1]
Awarded as Best Screenplay (including both original and adapted)
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1980s
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1990s
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2000s
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2010s
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2020s
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International
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National
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People
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Other
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