Teatro Municipal de Tui | Sunday 5th May 21:00h
What you are about to watch is not a film. It is the evocation of a film. A film that has disappeared. Canto de emigración (1935) was an unusual avant-garde film in which Tony Román, from Ourense, portrayed the story of Galician emigration using cinema in the lexicon of the great directors of the time, mostly Soviet, who aspired to “pure cinema”. The film has not been preserved, but traces have appeared that help us to imagine it: a lot of photographs published in the press of the time, or kept by the family of the leading actor – Celso Madriñán; the plot narrated by the author in a magazine at the time of the premiere; and, above all, the score that Teódulo R. Páramos composed to accompany the images.
This is the basis from which we start to evoke Canto de emigración. We add illustrations and shots from other films related to this one (in particular O carro e o home, by Román himself), and we work with original photographs… We know that it is impossible to bring a lost film back to life. What we aspire to do is to suggest it, to help imagine it. Hopefully the film will appear one day and this work will become useless. In the meantime, here is an evocation.
An OlloVivo production. Directed by: Pepe Coira. Production: Gaspar Broullón. Realised by: Óscar Pardo. Edited by: Jorge Coira. Ilustrations: Xoán Arellano. Assistant direction: Clara Coira. Assistant realisation: Coral Piñeiro
Music interpreted by: Orquesta Clásica de Vigo. Arrangements and direction: Manuel Martínez Álvarez-Nava. Management: Manuel Martínez Torres
With the collaboration of the Museo do Pobo Galego, Diputación de Ourense, Fundación Carlos Velo