Like his film Rocío, Fernando Ruiz Vergara himself escaped from rigid identitarian corsets. His journey as an economic emigrant in Northern Europe and his political exile in Portugal, where he discovered militant and liberation cinema as a form of collective struggle, prompted him to return briefly to Andalusia, his land of origin, to film Rocío. The film’s production process discarded the idea of a strictly Spanish nationality in favour of a Hispanic/Andalusian-Portuguese one that blurs the borders: The film's crew came from both countries, it was financed thanks by cultural initiatives in Portugal, and it eventually was edited between Lisbon and Madrid. At the same time, Rocío creates an image of Andalusia emancipated from the clichés that the Franco regime and cultural centralism had attributed to this Southern region. In the seminar, we will discuss how perspectives of migration and political exile reshape views of the constitution of nation and state, and how these in turn require and enable new forms of cooperation and solidarity, production and distribution in cinema.

10 December 2024, 9:30–12:00
AFL-E-003 (ground floor), Affolternstrasse 56, 8050 Zürich

Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado are filmmakers, lecturers and researchers at the University of Málaga. For the last ten years they have been carrying out academic and cinematographic research on the work of the Andalusian filmmaker Fernando Ruiz Vergara. This research resulted in the book La poscensura en el cine documental de la transición española (2016) and their short film Descartes (2021). They have recently finished the feature film Caja de resistencia about the filmmaker’s unfinished projects.

This event is part of an ongoing cooperation between the SNSF-funded research project Paranational Cinema –Legacies and Practices at the Department of Film Studies, University of Zurich and the Master Cultural Critique in Curatorial Studies at Zurich University of the Arts.