Elena López Riera is one of the major voices of Spanish cinema to emerge in the last decade. Although she gives the impression that her work is still in the process of taking off, her CV begs to point out quite the contrary. With a Ph.D in Audiovisual Communication, in 2009 she set up the audiovisual experimentation group ‘Lacasinegra’, years before she made her first solo film, Pueblo (2013).
Like most of the great filmmakers of our time, her work is not restricted to running times and the size or budget of her films. She is certainly no stranger to Bilbao, since her short films Las vísceras (2014) and Los que desean (2018) were prizewinners at the Bilbao International Short Film Festival. The latter took the Festival’s Grand Prix.
Her first feature film was a contender in Filmmakers’ Fortnight at the Cannes Festival: El agua (2022), and was a Goya award nominee for best new director.
This year, following its premiere at the Cannes “Semaine de la Critique” and programming for the San Sebastián Film Festival, ZINEBI is bringing her new medium-length film Las novias del sur (2024), to Bilbao. This is a new exercise, a from-the-gut perspective of that which is most familiar to her, for the purposes, in dry, direct discourse, of preserving a reality which might possibly be lost otherwise, on the erroneous grounds that it is considered irrelevant.
López Riera will be talking at ZINEBI Networking about her trajectory and the films that have marked her cinematographic career.
