FOTOFILM

Coordinadora: María Abenia

Second edition of the collective workshop with A-level students from the IES Alcalá secondary school, focused on documenting and following the 30th anniversary of the Punta Blanca Surf Club this year, in the town of Guía de Isora. Using archive photos, and photographs taken with their own cameras, both mobile phones and mid-range reflex cameras, the group, coordinated by the photographer, filmmaker and teacher María Abenia Gracia, reflects on and researches, from micro to macro, the universe surrounding this renowned sport, which began to be practiced along the Tenerife coast in the 1960s, when the canarian seashores underwent a drastic transformation as a result of mass tourism and the impetus of Spanish economic developmentalism. The collective dynamics that emerge around surfing, since it began and to the present day, the aesthetics and culture that define it, its underlying socio-emotional layer and the interpersonal relationships that arise, the way surfers relate to the sea, and the alternative outlet that surfing is for teenagers, make up the active part of the work carried out in this workshop. The activity also considers the composition principles and the expressive weight of photographic language both to create and interpret images, and to further explore the visual polysemy. The formation of the image, the composition principles, the expressive value of the elements of photographic language, the analysis and awareness of the perspective, are some of the topics addressed, as well as exploring and recognising the work of such important and prolific photojournalists such as Cartier Bresson, Vivian Maier and Robert Capa, filmmakers and/or body in motion researchers such as Leni Reifenstahl and Eadweard Muybridge, and contemporary photographers such as Alec Soth, Oscar Monzón, Miren Pastor, Cristina Rodero and Cristóbal Hara. The resulting audiovisual piece, created using the narrative assembly of the fixed images taken by the group, will be screened during the MiradasDoc 2022 Festival, with the Isora, por vía oral project.

María Abenia
Photographer, filmmaker, teacher, scriptwriter and film programmer. She first trained in the world of Pedagogy, working as a children and teenagers teacher for almost ten years at schools in the US, Scotland and Spain. She then studied Documentary Photography at the Escuela Blankpaper in Madrid, Film Directing at the ESCAC and Film Theory and Contemporary Audiovisual Media at the UPF in Barcelona. She produced and wrote the short, La cabaña (2012), and produced the special Cine al Cierzo for the Zaragoza Film festival (2016) together with a retrospective in commemoration of the death of Abbas Kiarostami. At present, as well as programming at MiradasDoc, she directes her short CIRCE (2022), filmed entirely in Tenerife, as well as being in the process of writing three feature lengths: her first work Lejoscerca (2022), La casa natal es el color primero (2021) by Canarian producer David Baute, and Sugar Island (2021) by Dominican director Johanne Gómez.

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