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SEVILLE 2021

EXCLUSIVE: Poster for Silvia Rey Canudo’s Seville-selected film Wan Xia

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- Based on the Goya-nominated short film of the same name, the movie was shot in Spain and China, and is being presented in The New Waves Non-fiction section of the 18th European Film Festival

EXCLUSIVE: Poster for Silvia Rey Canudo’s Seville-selected film Wan Xia

Hooking up once again with the universe of the Centro de Mayores senior citizens’ centre in the Madrilenian neighbourhood of Usera, which was at the heart of the short film of the same name that earned itself a nomination for a Goya Award in 2018 after receiving a prize at DocumentaMadrid, the feature Wan Xia, again directed by Silvia Rey Canudo, will be world-premiered at the 18th edition of the Seville European Film Festival, where it will be competing in The New Waves Non-fiction section. The director herself and producer Luis Ángel Ramírez will be in attendance to introduce it on 9 November.

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And so Silvia Rey Canudo returned to the same Chinese senior citizens’ centre in Madrid in order to film this movie, slap bang in the middle of the preparations for their anniversary party. The spectre of Barco Pequeño (lit. “Small Boat”) roams the centre, bored, yearning to escape and return to China, while the protagonist of the director’s previous movie, Fundación de la República (lit. “Foundation of the Republic”), leaves his charge to another custodian and travels to the city where he was born, Qingtian, to accompany the film crew as they capture the dying rays of dusk.

Silvia Rey Canudo, who graduated in Audiovisual Communication at the Complutense University of Madrid and has a Master in Creative Documentary from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, is a director, screenwriter and cinema programmer. She made her feature debut in 2012 with the documentary Dios sabe.

“After the previous short film, I managed to get funding to shoot, but so much time had passed that the innocence of the initial moment had been lost,” the filmmaker states. “Everyone was aware that a movie was being made, and that the previous one had been quite successful, so I decided to incorporate that into the film, and I even asked the main character to travel to China and asked him to be the one to tell the Spanish viewers directly what we were watching. With the parallels between the real-life Qingtian and the one that is talked about in the centre, I also managed to draw attention to that intangible link that unites the elderly people in the centre with their birth place, like parallel universes, making that visible.”

Wan Xia is being produced by IMVAL Madrid.

Check out our exclusive poster below:

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(Translated from Spanish)

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