The director and screenwriter from Madrid, Guillermo García López, has been recognised today with the 2020 Princess of Girona Foundation Arts and Literature Award. The winner’s name was announced after a teleconference held by the jury of experts chaired by visual artist Lita Cabellut, and composed of writer, journalist and filmmaker Luis Alegre; publicist Lluís Bassat; theatre producer Jesús Cimarro; journalist Montserrat Domínguez; artistic director of the Liceu Opera House in Barcelona Victor Garcia de Gomar; cinema producer Luis Manso and artist Juan Zamora, acting as secretary to the jury and winner of the FPdGi Award in the same category in 2017.
The jury chose García López “for his versatility as a cinema producer, writer and director and his strong social and humanitarian commitment on a multinational and global scale”, highlighting his ability to look “beyond frontiers and focus his attention on pressing social issues, such as migration and climate change, revealing today’s generational needs”.
The jury defined Guillermo García López’s work as a “push and encouragement for our society and the art world”. The chair of the jury, Lita Cabellut, also emphasised the “extraordinary” quality of all the candidates nominated for this category.
The winner’s first feature-length film, Frágil Equilibrio (Delicate Balance), which won the Goya Award for Best Documentary in 2017, had its international premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) and went on to win the Doc Spain Award on its national premiere at the Seminci Film Festival in Valladolid. García López has also won many other awards during his career.
In a message sent to the Foundation, García López said that the award “is outstanding support to help maintain a space for creative freedom and a breath of fresh air to be able to continue focusing on my work”.
Winner’s biography
Filmmaker Guillermo García López (1985) graduated in Audiovisual Communication from the Complutense University in Madrid and specialised in Production at the Puerta Bonita Centre. His first feature-length film, Frágil Equilibrio (Delicate Balance, 2016), won the Goya Award for Best Documentary and premiered at IDFA. The film also won the Doc Spain Award on its national premiere at the Seminci Film Festival in Valladolid, as well as many other awards, selections and showings at festivals in Edinburgh, Thessaloniki, Reykjavik and Gijon, among others. In 2017, he created, wrote and co-directed the series Atlánticas, composed of three films that blend documentary and fiction genres: Deshielo, Inmersión and Oscilación, which were shown on Spanish National Television.
A member of the European Film Academy and Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he has given masterclasses on documentary cinema at educational institutions such as the Faculty of Information Sciences at the UCM, the University of Zaragoza and California Polytechnic State University, and run cinema workshops for young people in areas at risk of social exclusion such as Sector 6 in La Cañada Real, Madrid. He also works as a teacher in interdisciplinary areas such as the Master’s in Architectural Communication at the Polytechnic University and Complutense University in Madrid, exploring the interaction between cinema and architecture in the Audiovisual Module. This aspect of his work led him to create the pieces Faceless and Lo-Tech Reality, the latter in collaboration with the Underground Resistance musical collective from Detroit.
García López is currently writing his first fiction film, Ciudad Sin Sueño (Sleepless City), a project he has won grants for through development programmes such as the Spanish Film Academy’s Residency, the Berlinale Talents’ Script Station (in the framework of the Berlin International Film Festival), the Torino Film Lab and Cinéfondation, the Cannes Film Festival Residency.
