MEDIA PRESENCE
My movies have been reviewed and featured in filmmaking magazines and books.
Here you can read some of those texts, with links to the original publications.
Caimán Cuadernos de Cine
(Notebooks of Cinema)
Most prestigious filmmaking magazine in Spain. Number 24, February 2014. Available here.
Best Shorts of the Year. Review by film critic Jara Yánez.
"The Video-Derives project was born in 2011 with the piece Sol (filmed during the 15-M demonstrations), which proposed a reflection on the audiovisual recording of the event itself by the citizens.
This project is now extended with the magnificent Air Vigilance, which, based on the demonstrations of May and September 2012 in Madrid, looks to the sky to explore aerial surveillance.
The diptych functions as a shot-reverse shot, moving from the power of the citizens, represented by the ground-level perspective, to institutional power, symbolized by the omnipresent helicopter overhead.
However, this piece stands independently of its companion. Through fabulous sound work, it proposes a journey through various genres, transitioning from political reflection to an analysis of the image itself.
As the film progresses from day to night, the document transcends its own status. It first becomes a horror film, then evolves into science fiction, and finally transforms into a fascinating experimental piece that plays with the pure abstraction of the pixel."
The Gaze of the Times
The Spanish Short Film in the 2000s
2010, Alcine. The book can be found here.
Review by Carlos Reviriego - Head of Programming at Filmoteca Española. Film critic and journalist (El Cultural). Chief Editor of Cahiers du Cinéma España.
"The paradoxes of communication in the post-digital universe underpin Inter-face, an intriguing piece awarded at the 2009 edition of the III Movil Film Fest.
The film depicts a video call in such a way that the essence of the shot is the computer screen, through which one of the interlocutors (whose subjective perspective matches that of the viewer) tries to maintain a conversation with his partner, who is strolling on the terrace of the Reina Sofía Museum. Both her monologue and the technical obstacles render the communication practically inoperative.
However, the dysfunctionality of the video call gives the film an interesting lyrical escape. After the call ends, the shot remains on the digital monitor, where the young interlocutor, who stays off-screen, replays the video of the call and tries to resolve the communication problem (a metaphor for the lack of understanding between the couple) to "correct" reality, albeit in a strictly virtual and solitary dimension.
The piece concludes with him arranging her portraits in photo editing software, an involuntarily voyeuristic gesture that suffices to imbue the end of a romantic relationship with melancholic sadness. The charm of Inter-face lies in the freshness and lack of pretense with which Flavio G. García imitates and supplants the cinematic frame with the visual content of a monitor—this box of fleeting images where the entire post-digital universe truly unfolds."
Spanish Cinema Against Itself
Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy.
Steven Marsh, Cátedra Editions (2022). Available here.
I’m honored that my films were featured in this book by Steven Marsh, a renowned film historian at the University of Illinois Chicago.
The book provides a fascinating exploration of Spanish film history, with my work analyzed in detail over more than three pages:
"This is not a journalistic initiative, as the purpose of his films is not to gather visual evidence to counter the distortions of mainstream media, nor to expose police brutality ... Nor is it propaganda, despite García's political affinities. However, García's abstract work is political in the performative sense I have previously defined. That is, through its very abstraction, by exceeding formal boundaries, it becomes, in and of itself, a political intervention."
You can read the full text in my blog.
