16/07/2015 - The seasoned Madrilenian filmmaker will receive this illustrious award on 19 September, as the San Sebastián International Film Festival is in full swing

Director, producer and screenwriter Fernando Trueba

The National Film Award is handed out by Spain’s Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA), an agency under the authority of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, and is endowed with €30,000. According to the jury, Fernando Trueba (born in 1955 in Madrid) has won the prize owing to “his undisputed professional career as a director, producer and screenwriter, in addition to his work in defence of the film profession since the beginning of his career, as the founder of the journal Casablanca and as a critic writing for El País and La guía del ocio”.

The jury that bestowed this prestigious award on him comprised Lorena González (managing director of the ICAA), Guadalupe Melgosa (deputy managing director of promotion and international relations at the ICAA), Antonio Resines (president of the Spanish Film Academy), Alicia Luna (a representative of ALMA), Francisco José Martínez Sánchez (FAPAE), Ginés García Millán (Actors’ and Actresses’ Union), Víctor García León (ARPA), Patricia Ferreira (CIMA), journalist Conchita Casanovas, producer Mikel Lejarza, José Luis Rebordinos (director of the San Sebastián Film Festival) and screenwriter Lola Salvador, winner of the National Film Award in 2014.

Trueba, who was president of the Spanish Academy of Film Arts and Sciences in 1988, has enjoyed a high-flying international career, as he won the Oscar for Best Foreign-language Film in 1993, with Belle Époque, he shot Two much in the USA, and he received the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986, for Year of Enlightenment. Furthermore, he has made successful forays into the world of animation (Chico & Rita [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
interview: Javier Mariscal, Tono Errando
film profile]) and documentary (Calle 54). In 1998, The Girl of Your Dreams, starring Penélope Cruz and Resines, won seven Goya Awards, and its sequel – La reina de España – will be shot in 2016 with the same cast and crew (read the news). 

(Translated from Spanish)