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INSTITUTIONS Spain

Enrique González Macho re-elected as president of the Spanish Film Academy

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- The producer, distributor and exhibitor beat producer Piluca Baquero by 290 votes to 110 in the elections held last Sunday

Enrique González Macho re-elected as president of the Spanish Film Academy
Enrique González Macho

At the end of February, just before the Goya gala, Enrique González Macho announced in an interview that he intended to step down from the position of president of the Spanish Film Academy. However, he did not rule out the possibility of running for the post again if the candidates seemed “strange and dangerous” for the institution. Producer Piluca Baquero's candidacy, announced on 7 April, must have seemed this way to him, since barely three days later, he changed his mind and decided to seek re-election.

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His mission was accomplished on Sunday 24 May, when the members of the academy decided to vote González Macho in ahead of Baquero. Together with the rest of his team of three, comprising actor Antonio Resines and director Judith Colell, the producer, distributor and exhibitor, who for many years headed Alta Films, managed to get 290 votes, far outweighing the 110 votes obtained by his challenger.

In addition, the elections were made all the more tense by the nomination of the new director general the day before, a position entailing responsibility for the day-to-day and financial management of the institution. After months of searching for a suitable candidate, the board of directors eventually decided to appoint Porfirio Enríquez to the post, a 71-year-old DoP with limited management experience, but who was on the board.

Now counting for nothing, a campaign had been kicked off by Baquero in which she was trying to promote a new point of view for Spanish cinema, based on improving the public's perception of local production and opening up to new funding platforms, including the internet.

Following the announcement of his victory, González Macho indicated that the main issues that he will be addressing in his new post will be “first of all, the legal framework for cinema, which is still up in the air, followed by piracy”. Nevertheless, he made a point of clarifying that these problems are “impossible for us to solve”.

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(Translated from Spanish)

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