The Thread that Makes the Gijón Festival Unique

Sections like Retuellos once again reveal the secret of why the FICX never grows old

There is an invisible thread —but one as sturdy as a sailor’s rope— that connects those who attended the first editions of the Gijón Festival, born in 1963 and then devoted to children’s and youth cinema, with the audiences who, in the 1990s, discovered its opening toward auteur filmmaking and, finally, with those who today, in 2025, fill its theatres. That thread is an appeal to curiosity: a curiosity almost intrinsic to every viewer willing to discover new forms and new obsessions in cinema as understood by its newest creators.

That spirit shapes, in the best possible sense, the Gijón audience. Here, one accepts —almost as an unspoken pact— that they will see films by unknown directors and expose themselves to what does not yet have a name. Often these works are embryonic sparks of talent, bubbles of ideas that herald the cinematic future even before the future dares to articulate itself. And almost always they are windows that let us glimpse, from the corner of the eye, the mutations of the world we inhabit. If we understand cinema as a notary of reality, then the FICX is the archive where those early records are kept.

Retuellos is surely the section that embraces this founding spirit with the greatest radicalism. In this year’s programme, the FIPRESCI jury has found valuable clues —sometimes sharp, sometimes merely intuited— to understand Generation Alpha’s obsessions with instant fame via social media (White Snail); the uneasy coexistence with the new distortions of the society of the spectacle (Sorella di clausura); coming-of-age stories that reject fixed sexual identities (Skiff); the rites of passage involved in opening a romantic relationship (Follies); the impulses that drive one to travel alone (Sugarland); or the temptation to explore new artistic languages (Brother Verse Brother, A Light That Never Goes Out, both strongly linked to music). Also emerging forcefully in the themes explored by debut or near-debut filmmakers are new perspectives on motherhood —its emotional intimacy and its social dimension— as seen in Love Letters and Caravan. And on a purely formal level, we sense the urge to incorporate aesthetic codes born outside cinema: Magic Farm, one might say, embeds memes and stickers into the image, while Follies brings Tinder conversations to the big screen.

If the world changes —and, obviously, it hasn’t stopped changing since Gijón screened its first film— then cinema must change with it. What is remarkable is that the festival also changes, yet without ceasing to be itself: amid transformation, it keeps its compass steady. Its will to bear witness to these creative and thematic convulsions —to these minimal seismic movements that anticipate the cinema, and the reality, to come— remains firm.

That is, perhaps, the true elixir of the FICX’s eternal youth: to keep growing without losing its capacity for wonder. And to continue being the place for all those films that do not yet have a place… perhaps because that space is still waiting to be invented.

Joan Pons
FIPRESCI 2025