Santiago de Compostela, March 20th, 2024. The 19th International Ethnographic Film Festival organised by Museum of Galician People will start today, Wednesday, March 20th, with a unique event in the Teatro Principal of Santiago de Compostela. Supported by MICE, 586 cantos is an audiovisual piece about the Popular Galician Songbook, essential work on the Galician oral tradition, the result of Dorothé Schubarth’s research work in collaboration with Antón Santamarina.
The original sound recordings, photographs, text transcriptions and scores, stored in Archive of the Oral Heritage of the Identity (APOI) of the Museum of Galician People by Schubarth explicit wish,are the starting point of this event where music and image will be in dialogue. Thus, the staging at Teatro Principal will feature the musical performance of Richi Casás, Fran Barcia, Tania Caamaño, and Antía Ameixeiras, live-synchronisedwith the visual staging Laura Piñeiro and Fran Rodríguez Casal—members of the Memory and Cinema Association—created for the MICE.
Following the opening session, at 10 pm, the Teatro Principal will host the first session of Trazas, one of the MICE parallel sections, organised in collaboration with Cineclube de Compostela and the Performing, Musical and Audiovisual Arts section of the Consello da Cultura Galega (Council for Galician Culture), focusing this 19th edition on Galician cinema and the Transition. The first film to be screened is Conxo, unha experiencia, by Manuel Abad, a reflection on artistic creation, mental illness and society, as well as a denunciation of the terrible conditions the inmates of the psychiatric hospital of Conxo, in Santiago de Compostela lived in. Afterwards, the attending people can watch the feature film CCCV, by Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, an overview of social and political struggles in Galicia during the Transition, through the selection and editing of material recorded by the cameraman Carlos Varela of the entire Galician national-popular movement.
Previously, at 5.30 pm, the first of the nine films included in the International section of this 19th MICE will be screened in the South Wing of the Museum of Galician People. Riada, by Carlos Tobón, is an ethnographic research about the consequences of a landscape alteration, such as the construction of the Hidroituango dam on the Cauca river. The Colombian film is one of the thirteen pieces competing for this year’s MICE Best Film Award.
