One of the most respected auteurs in Spanish cinema, José Luis Guerín was born in Barcelona in 1960. He began his career with experimental short films in his youth and made the leap to feature-length filmmaking in 1984 with Berta's Motives, which won an award at the Berlinale Forum. In 1990, he directed Innisfree, a film based on another film, John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952), a project that took him to the Irish town of Innisfree to explore the resonances of Ford's legendary work in the lives of its residents. This was followed in 1997 by Train of Shadows, an archaeological revisiting of Gérard Fleury's amateur footage; a film that displays a beautiful poetics of the image as a trace of absence, interweaving fiction and reality like two sides of the same reversible fabric. In 2001, he completed En construcción, his most critically acclaimed project, which was recognized with the FIPRESCI Prize and the Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival, as well as the National Film Award and the Goya Award for Best Documentary in 2002 – it is an immersion into the El Raval neighborhood of Barcelona during its urban restructuring process. At the 2007 Venice Film Festival, he presented In the City of Sylvia, delving once again into fiction; the film is a fable about desire and the process of artistic creation. With Jonas Mekas, he made the documentary Correspondence Jonas Mekas – J.L. Guerín (2011), and among his most recent works is The Academy of Muses (2015), always testing, with immense sensitivity, the boundaries between fiction and documentary. This major director's latest film, Good Valley Stories, will be shown at this edition of LEFFEST, and he will be present.
