The work will focus all aspects of this 17th edition of the International Ethnographic Film Festival. The graphic image is based on a photograph of an industrial chimney, an element that refers to the manufacturing processes of modernity, and at the same time, a model that withdraws in the face of strong technologization and digitalization.
A refurbished chimney protected by an steel structure preserves the memories of the former Regojo, the business group based in Redondela that employed more than 1,500 people from the end of the 1950s until the 1970s. Regojo manufactured high-end shirts that were marketed throughout the Iberian Peninsula. One of its most famous brands was the “Dalí” shirt, advertised on television by the artist himself. Its founder, José Regojo, from Zamora, near the Portuguese border, began his business career in Portugal. There he met his future wife, Rita Otero, and they both decided to move to the town of Pontevedra and establish their lives and the headquarters of Regojo shirts there. After decades of presiding over the daily life of the people of Redondela and after becoming one of the main Spanish textile groups, the factory had to close at the beginning of the eighties. All that remains of it is the chimney, photographed for this 17th edition of MICE by the journalist Mónica Ares (Silleda).
Pastora, one of the workers at Regojo who sewed, ironed and made boxes in the last ten years of the factory, remembers the importance of this company in the town. “Everyone worked at Regojo! Then, even as a woman, I wasn’t afraid to walk to work at five in the morning because the streets were full of people going to the same place, to the shirt factory”. Of the garments, she says that “the shirts were the best there were, they fit very well, they were perfect”. He also speaks fondly of the founder of the textile company: “Don José (José Regojo) was my boss, a very good person, and his wife, Rita Otero, I didn’t know her personally because she died before I worked there, but everyone spoke of her as an excellent person”. All that remains of Regojo’s factory is the chimney: located in a public park with information panels and surrounded by a series of elements related to the textile industry sculpted in stone by the students of the Redondela Sostenible youth guarantee workshop.
The 17th MICE is supported by the Museo do Pobo Galego, the City Council of Santiago, the Deputación da Coruña and Agadic.
It will be held from 28 March to 2 April in Santiago de Compostela.
