MAPA

The much-anticipated feature-length debut of cult film director León Siminiani has won the Eurodoc Giraldillo for Best Non-fiction Film at the latest Sevilla European Film Festival.  Somewhere between documentary and fiction, Mapa is a road movie told in the first person about a young filmmaker who travels to India in search of a new “map” of love, of life.  Upon returning home, however, things don't go exactly  as he had hoped...   Director León Siminiani studied Hispanic Philology and Film Direction at Columbia University, New York.  A fervent believer in the possibilities presented by audiovisual media, he has worked with different formats and genres.  Of his fiction film work, of note are Dos más [Two More] (2001), (Best Drama at the EMMY Student Awards 2002 and Public Choice at the Versión Española Awards), Archipiélago [Archipelago] (2003) (Jury Prize, Best Screenplay, and Public Choice at Columbia University, 2003, and a finalist at the Latino Filmmakers Showcase 2004, by Sundance Channel), and Ludoterapia (2007), which took the award for Best Short Film at Europa Cinema 2007.  Of his non-fiction work, of note are his series of mini-documentaries, Conceptos Clave del Mundo Moderno [Key Concepts of the Modern World], whose first four parts –La oficina [The Office] (1998), El permiso [The Permit] (2001), Digital (2003) and El tránsito [Transit] (2009)– have garnered more than one hundred international awards.  Siminiani has also explored hybrid formats in pieces such as Zoom (2005) and the series Límites [Limits] (2009), winner of the First Place Award at the Festival de Alcalá (Alcine 09) and First Place Award of the Latin American Short Films Contest at Versión Española (TVE).  In 2011 he released a new fiction short entitled El premio [The Prize], whose fiction story built around the facts of a real event earned it a nomination at the 2012 Goya awards for Best Fiction Short Film.
The screening on January 24 will feature a presentation and discussion led by director León Siminiani and Félix Piñuela, director of "Versión Española".