After its 11-day run, As Bestas (The Beasts) was named this year’s Audience Choice at the 22nd edition of the Pelicula Spanish Film Festival.
As is tradition in the festival, the re-screening of the winning film formally concludes the festival.
As Bestas is a 2022 Spanish-French thriller film directed and produced by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, who wrote the screenplay with Isabel Peña.
It is a co-production between Spain and France and interestingly features a mix of Spanish, French, and Galician in its dialogue.
It stars Denis Ménochet, Marina Foïs, Luis Zahera, Diego Anido and Marie Colomb.
Incidentally back in Spain, As Bestas, has also been critically acclaimed at the 2023 Goya Awards by winning nine awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.
It also won the César Award for Best Foreign Film.
It follows the complicated fate and ordeal of a married French couple who decided to resettle in the Galician countryside, in a sleepy Spanish town with abandoned village houses for a simpler life and engage in organic farming that was sabotaged by their menacing neighbors.
The film’s escalating conflicts are amid the prospects of a wind farm project and glaringly explores the critical themes and issues of xenophobia, and racial and class tensions set in contexts of poverty and clashes of the old and new.
Fittingly, As Bestas is one of the green films included in this year’s Pelicula en verde initiative, where each time a viewer watches any of the films in this category equates to a tree being planted.
This green initiative is in partnership with giant Spanish infrastructure company Acciona, Haribon Foundation, and Instituto Cervantes Manila.
The tree planting will start on November 21 in Tanay, Rizal.
Every year, on October, Instituto Cervantes organizes the PELÍCULA>Pelikula Spanish film festival as a showcase of films in the Spanish language.
PELíCULA 2023 is a project of Instituto Cervantes in Shangri-La Plaza, in collaboration with the Embassies of Spain in the Philippines, Australia, and Singapore, the AECID, the Film Development Council of the Philippines, Filmoteca Española, the Embassy of Colombia and the Embassy of Mexico, with the participation of the Embassy of Chile, the Embassy of Argentina, and Haribon Foundation, and sponsored by Vibal Foundation, Acciona, Philippine Transmarine Carriers, Arthaland, SSI Group, Inc., Barcino, La Latina and Fundador.
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