The Ages of the Brain, Leitmotiv of the 7th Edition of the Brain Film Fest

The festival, driven by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, will be held at the CCCB from March 13 to 17

• Cinema and Neuroscience in about 40 productions and activities on Mental Health, Emotional Resilience, Alzheimer’s, and Innovation Linked to the Brain
• One of the Highlights will be a case study on the Emotional Management of the Actors in The Snow Society, with casting director María Laura Berch and actor Santiago Vaca
• The Eternal Memory, Oscar-Nominated, opens the festival that also dedicates a retrospective to its director, Maite Alberdi, Special Brain Film Fest 2024 Award
• The festival will close with The Longest Goodbye, a documentary by Ido Mizrahy reflecting on the psychological cost for astronauts in space exploration

Barcelona, February 23, 2024.– The Brain Film Fest will celebrate its 7th edition between March 13 and 17 at the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), with the ages of the brain as its leitmotiv. Driven by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation and co-organized with Minimal Films, with the collaboration of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology – Ministry of Science and Innovation (FECYT), the first European festival dedicated to the brain will this year screen 8 feature films and 22 short films in its two competitive sections, and nine more films in parallel screenings. In addition, there will be the usual round tables, workshops, presentations, and case studies accompanying the cinematic experience.

“Our brain evolves and transforms from the day we are born,” recalls Cristina Maragall, president of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation. “Today’s science allows us to know much more about how it is at each stage of our lives, and cinema bears witness to this. When the theme of the different ages of the brain is so present on our screens, we know we must explore it at the Brain Film Fest,” she adds.

The Importance of Memory

The festival will open with the screening of The Eternal Memory by Maite Alberdi, nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary. The director will also be the protagonist of a retrospective of her work. Films such as La Once (2014), The Mole Agent (2020), and the short film I am not from here (2016) will be shown. The Chilean filmmaker will also receive the Special Brain Film Fest 2024 Award in recognition of a cinematic career that has often explored old age and brain-related themes with a lucid and empathetic gaze. The Alzheimer’s suffered by Augusto Góngora, the protagonist of the inspiring and luminous love story he lives with Paulina Urrutia in The Eternal Memory, is also the theme of other films to be enjoyed at the Brain Film Fest. One of them, While you are you, the here and now of Carme Elías, recently won the Goya and Gaudí awards and is part of the Official Section and will be shown in a session to benefit Alzheimer’s research. It was at the Brain Film Fest where Carme Elías made her diagnosis public.

The documentary A Lifetime, by Marta Romero, also addresses Alzheimer’s, a love letter to her grandparents that will be seen in the Schools Section, dedicated to the adolescent audience. It will also offer The Life of Brianeitor, by Álvaro Longoria, who will present the film accompanied virtually by the protagonist of the film, a generational phenomenon in the world of gamers and streamers thanks to the hundreds of thousands of followers of his Twitch channel. Brianeitor suffers from degenerative muscle atrophy and is a role model for young people as a model of overcoming and willpower.

The festival has scheduled a special session of Charles Chaplin’s masterpiece The Kid, intended for people with Alzheimer’s. In the framework of the festival, the video game Inner Ashes, featuring a protagonist who suffers from the same disease, will be presented, and the public will be invited to try it.

When cinema pushes you to the limit

One of the highlights of the activities organized by the Brain Film Fest this year is the case study on the emotional management of the actors in The snow society. In collaboration with the Catalan Film Academy and the Executive Audiovisual Production Master’s of the University Blanquerna and PROA, the Theatre Hall of the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) will be the venue, on March 15, for an event that will discuss the intense process of preparation, filming, and subsequent emotional evolution of the film’s performers amid adverse conditions and situations that pushed them to the limit. This session will be led by María Laura Berch, casting director and acting coach of J. A. Bayona’s film, and will feature one of its protagonists, Santiago Vaca Narvaja.

The activities also highlight round tables on the application of artificial intelligence in people’s well-being, adolescence, ageism and the prejudices and stereotypes it causes, or the relationship between biological gender and brain aging.

Emotions, Mental Health, and Artificial Intelligence

While The Eternal Memory will inaugurate the Brain Film Fest 2024, the closure will come with the premiere of The Longest Goodbye, a documentary by Ido Mizrahy that closely examines the mental health challenges experienced by astronauts during their missions to Mars and the role played by NASA psychologists. Emotional management is also the central theme of Àma Gloria, the film by Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq and one of the strong titles of a Competitive Official Section that also includes three prestigious Spanish films reflecting on gender and age: Creatura, by Elena Martín Gimeno, and 20,000 Species of Bees, by Estíbaliz Urresola Solaguren (both winners of the Gaudí for Best Film), and Mamacruz, by Patricia Ortega, with which Kiti Manver has won the Carmen and ASECAN awards.

The Official Section also features two feature films about mental health: the Austrian film Club Zero, in which director Jessica Hausner presents a disturbing thriller about nutritional sects causing eating disorders among their followers. And the Dutch-British co-production Silver Haze, by Sacha Polak, uses social cinema tools to reflect the experience of a young fire victim, played by an actress, Vicky Knight, who also suffered severe burns when she was a child. The competitive feature section is completed by Mars Express, by Jérémie Pèrin, a French animated production nominated for the César that raises a handful of questions about our relationship with artificial intelligence.

Big and Brief Stories

Some of the themes underpinning the feature film programming are also part of the twenty or so short films competing in this year’s Brain Film Fest edition. For example, Alzheimer’s is the subject of Paris 70, the most awarded Spanish short film of last year with more than sixty recognitions. Mental health underpins shorts such as Stigma or Diafonie. The program also addresses reflections on mourning (Anastatica, BRAK, Flashbaker, Hipocampo, or Betiko gaua. The Eternal Night), traumas (7:11 Quartz, Demon Box, Ethel), other diseases (Torcidos, La danse de Saint Guy, or Hope), or personality disorders (Influencer).

Juries

The two competitive sections will have their respective juries. Actor and theater director Josep Maria Pou, journalist Samanta Villar, Imma Aguilar (director of FECYT, Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology), and Glòria Oliver (manager of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation) form the jury of the Official Feature Section. The shorts, meanwhile, will be evaluated by a second jury composed of the artistic director of the Filmets de Badalona, Agustí Argelich; Carla Rubio, presenter of the 3Cat program Ets un motivat, dedicated to mental health; and Eduard Vallory, director of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST) and president of CATESCO.

Acció<Cinema collaborates in the screening of Àma Gloria and the Unconscious Bias and Children’s Animation workshops. It is an initiative driven by Catalunya Film Festivals, in collaboration with the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation of the Department of External Action and European Union and the Department of Culture, which promotes audiovisuals as a tool for building an educated, critical, and mobilized citizenry for a fairer world. We connect the world of cooperation with that of cinema, the public, and reality, critical analysis, and action. Because in a global world, solutions are global.