‘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.
Nobody Knows Anybody 