‘Un impulso colectivo’ [a collective impulse] is a regular section of Barcelona’s D’A Festival, and takes its name from a September 2013 article by programmer/critic Carlos Losilla in the magazine Caimán cuadernos de cine (he programmed the films in the section’s first iteration in 2014, and I believe has been responsible for doing so in the ten years since as well). In the previous version of this blog, I started off on the trail of el otro cine español (that link is the tag for related pieces on this site) but quickly found it to be a nebulous term that included such an array of filmmakers (for example, Caimán‘s list of 52 directors of ‘nuevo/otro cine español’) that it was difficult to know where to begin. I ended up starting a mini-project focussed on the films that appeared in the first edition of ‘Un impulso colectivo’ because I realised that it had been programmed so as to give an overview of the cinema being made on the margins/periphery in Spain. I wrote a summary of what I found in that initial collection of films, and then I went to the D’A Festival in 2015 (the various pieces/interviews I wrote about the films on that trip are collected on the old blog) because I realised that if I wanted to see films that pertained to this collective impulse, I needed to travel.

As I have written previously, in the aftermath of going to Barcelona I was even less sure about how to approach the topic:

[W]hat I observed in Barcelona also made me question whether this otro cine español was a real movement or simply a convenient tag to apply to filmmakers who are working outside of the industrial norm in Spain. Branding of a sort – which has its own uses for the filmmakers in question if they can travel as a group – but a very loose wrapper to bind together some filmmakers who are actually quite distinct from each other in terms of the films they are making. Interestingly, the people I interviewed in Barcelona seemed just as uncertain as to whether they were part of an actual phenomenon or if it is only the latest incarnation of an ongoing occurrence that had (for a range of reasons) gained more press attention in the past couple of years.

At around the same time, I got interested in novo cinema galego (a fairly large grouping within the overall ‘archipelago’ of el otro cine español) and decided to move on to that as my focus for a while…but in the end my travels had to stop (funds not being infinite and paid employment needing to be prioritised), and my investigations came to a halt. So I have only periodically kept up to date with what was being programmed at D’A Festival (and have sometimes managed to track down a title on DVD), but my interest in cinema in general waned in the last few years, so I am now very much out of the loop.

All of which is a long-winded preamble to saying that I’ve discovered that the festival has now made a five part podcast series about ‘un impulso colectivo’ and independent cinema made on the periphery in Spain, including interviews with several of the key filmmakers. It’s in Spanish, so it’s not going to be accessible to everyone – but if you have any Spanish, give it a go (I’ve been learning [or relearning] French this year and listening to interviews with French filmmakers and actors to increase my aural comprehension – if you’re listening to subjects that you know something about, it’s surprising how quickly you can pick up the gist). I haven’t had a chance to start it yet, but the episodes are only around 30 minutes – I’m looking forward to bringing myself up-to-date, and will probably also have a dig around the D’A website to work out what films I’ve missed hearing about in the last few years.

• Episode 1: el impulso
• Episode 2: el colectivo
• Episode 3: la periferia
• Episode 4: la posibilidad de una filmografía
• Episode 5: el futuro

If anyone has any recommendations for Spanish or French language podcasts about Spanish or French cinema respectively, please let me know.