A three-part Shanghai program, Stories Travel Further – Literature and Cinema in Spain-China Dialogue, forms part of the Spain – Where Talent Ignites campaign, unleashed at Cannes with three shorts
In the last two years, Spanish directors have had more films in Cannes Festival main competition – five – than any other country in the world.
On June 17, Prime Video announced that Spain was its No. 1 non-English export force, recently scoring as many hits in its Non-English Global Top 10 films as the rest of the world put together.
Clearly, as Thierry Frémaux put it explaining three Spanish competition titles this year, Spain is living a “movement.”
Some of that momentum looks set to be caught on June 21 in Shanghai at Stories Travel Further – Literature and Cinema in Spain-China Dialogue, a three-part session, part of the Spain – Where Talent Ignites campaign, unspool at the Shanghai Film Festival.
In one major highlight, Albert Serra, a Cannes competition contender in 2022 whose English-language debut “Out of This World,” starring Riley Keough is being talked up for a major 2026 festival, will talk with China’s Bi Gan, a Cannes 2025 Special Jury Prize winner for “Resurrection,” about storytelling, adaptation processes, creative vision and the capacity to connect cultures.
They are likely to find common ground. The Tahiti-set “Pacification,” wrote Variety, recorded “the enduring colonialist entitlement of the French Republic territory’s Gallic custodians and the ever-itching resentment felt by its indigenous population.” Co-producing “Magellan,” directed by Filipino Lav Díaz, Serra adopted the viewpoint of another culture supposedly distant from his own.
Bi Gan’s “Resurrection,” meanwhile, is described by Variety as a “marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition, an overarchingly melancholy elegy for the dream of 20th-century cinema and the lives we lived within it,” no less.
Serra won high praise from Variety for his latest release, “Afternoons of Solitude,” a remarkable documentary that observes the matador life in all its absurd beauty and obscene bloodshed,” which won San Sebastián top Golden Shell in 2024., which again demonstrated his powers of empathy.
He will not be the only Spanish talent on display in Shanghai, however. At Stories Travel Further – Literature and Cinema in Spain-China Dialogue, Fernando Benzo, author and secretary general of the Spanish Federation of Publishers, will drill down on a “safe intellectual property: books,” as he put it.
“When you work on a book, usually you already have the fan base. You have all the people that have read those books, so it’s a stronger bet than if you work with original material.” That readership is powered up organically by one of the largest language markets in the world. Also, he told Variety, “you have a powerful book industry and a powerful audiovisual industry, so the result has to be good.”
In fact it already is. On June 17 in Madrid, at Prime Video Presents, a preview of Prime Video Spain’s upcoming titles, Prime Video announced that Spain-produced Originals are its biggest non-English export.
Of the six Spanish movies in the Top 10 of Non-English Prime Original Films over June 1-7, five morever are literary adaptations. These are comprised of small screen makeovers of Argentine-Spanish writer Mercedes Ron’s “My Fault” Wattpad trilogy and “Tell Me Softly,” the first installment in another Ron YA romantic melodrama trilogy, and zombie action thriller “Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End,” adapting Galician author Manel Loureiro’s novel.
Top 10 Non-English Prime Original Films: June 1-7
2. “No Place to Be Single” (“Non è un Paese per Single,” Italy)
8. “Tell Me Softly” (Dímelo Bajito,” Spain)
9. “Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End” (“Apocalipsis Z: El principio del fin,” Spain)
Carla Simón, Nicolás Méndez, Turbo Shorts: Further International Breakout Talent, & Other Spanish Creative Industries
Literature and Cinema in Spain-China Dialogue will unspool as Spain rolls off a larger cultural lift-off. World premiered at the Cannes Film Festival – as part of Where Talent Ignites, organized by Audiovisual From Spain-ICEX – three short films, to screen at the Shanghai’s Dialogue, captures once more Spanish creative momentum. Framing international breakout talent, they also open a different door onto contemporary Spanish creativity, linking cinema, fashion, design, music, performance, animation and contemporary visual storytelling.
A brief closer look at the three shorts:
The latest from Simón, a 2022 Berlin Golden Bear winner for “Alcarràs” and 2025 Cannes competition contender with “Romería,” has built an international reputation for a cinema grounded in a sense place while exploring universal issues. In “Flamenco,” she creates a psychological, emotional and cultural parable plumbing Spain’s contemporary flamenco scene and creativity. In it, Rocío, played by Rocío Molina, a leading light of the international flamenco vanguard, returns to her Ebro Delta home to attend the funeral of her mother, a bastion of traditional flamenco. At a later theater performance, however, Rocío dances assimilating, she senses, the spirit of her mother. “Understanding where you come from and using it in creative terms sets you free,” Simón told Variety, talking about Rocío and herself.
Méndez broke out directing Rosalia’s extraordinary music vid “Berghain.” The focus of La Tarara, however, is not music, but fashion. It turns on Carmen (Ingrid García Jonsson), brainy but socially tongue-tied whose sister (Barbara Lennie, star of Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas”) works in fashion. When sis takes off for a week, she moves into her flat to take care of her obstreperous nephew. It’s only when Carmen dons her sister’s red dress, which she brings back from the cleaners, that she establishes a connection with her nephew. She also gains in much-needed assurance. “La Tarara” marks Méndez’s first fiction film. Compared to “Berghain,” “I’m really interested in trying something much more grounded but talking not just about fashion but the creative act itself, its transformative power and as a form of communication,” Méndez has told Variety.
“La Llama” Director: Pau López, Gerardo del Hierro
An animated short film from creative duo López and Hierro, known as Turbo, “La Llama” pictures a young man exploring an ever mutating house. Both are drawn from Spanish auteurist designer Jaime Hayon’s arresting sense of design – a protagonist with a beak nose, shiny colors, an avoidance of sharp angles – which recreates over a century of Spanish design and architecture. Every single object pictured in the animated film – chairs, tables, sofas, a bed, even a brilliant red ash tray – are made by designers from Spain. Meanwhile, galvanizing the short and connecting its 2D/3D animation not only to design but music, the short is galvanised by a score by remarkable young Spanish flamenco guitarist Yerai Cortés and voiceover by notable singer La Tania, who dispenses advise to wannabe creators: “First comes emotion, then creation.” “Explore disobedience.” Recreating some of the design/architecture wonders of Spain – Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, for instance – “La Llama” captures an extraordinary Spain which sometimes still escapes the homogenization of economies of scale and global brand licensing driving much of architecture and cityscapes worldwide today.
