UNDERGROUND FILMMAKER CARLOS ATANES

The independent and underground director Carlos Atanes has expressed repeatedly his desire to continue doing cinema in the style of the seventies of last century. As certain characters from his recent science fiction movies, this odd filmmaker proclaims to be out of context in the nowadays cinema. Are they statements from an insane person? By no means: Carlos Atanes neither has done time travels nor goes out of his mind. It's just that his nature is not of this time. Nostalgia of a better past? Neither. Or not completely. The digital technology supposes a democratization without precedents in production and distribution means. Atanes always has been positioned in favour of this radical change and celebrates its worldwide implementation. He newer would leave digital cinema in favor of celluloid.

So, to what does he refer with seventies? Very simple: that decade gave a very bold cinema. A mad, strange, adventurous, different, odd cinema, rabble and surprising. Werner Herzog, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brian de Palma, Marco Ferreri, Ken Russell, Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Iván Zulueta, Roman Polanski or John Waters, among other many people, coincided in realizing during these years their more intense, weird and visionary films. Movies that no producer seated in the industry would produce nowadays. In spite of the democratization without precedents that digital revolution has brought, the approved taste has penalized boldness curtailing it for the most eager public.

Carlos Atanes proposes to recover the creative freedom using the advantages that new technologies are offering to us. Films made apart from fashions, commercial dictations or pre-established rules. He began it more than twenty years ago and still he continues taking care of it. The result: a personal and strange cinema, object of fierce hatreds and unconditional adhesions to equal parts. An unclassifiable and atanic cinema.

Bio-Filmography

Carlos Atanes was born in Barcelona in 1971. Scarcely there has come out more information about his private life. It is known that he began to direct films in 1987, with some high school mates and a given video camera. And it is known that between ends of the 80s and beginning of the 90s he did film studies in Barcelona, but it is not known by accuracy what school was since for any motive he has never showed interest to advertise its name. In 1989 he shoots a feature film on travel trips entitled La Ira that nobody has seen with the exception of the own crew members.

Morir de Calor was his first shortfilm publicly screened (Festival Cinema Jove de València, 1991) and The Marvellous World of the Cucu Bird (1991) his first and last 35 mm. shortfilm (ended), the most peculiar work of narrative structure (inspired by Moebius's tape) that woke a great admiration up among the few ones that could appreciate it. Tríptico (1994) repeats with the photochemical format, this time 16 mm, in an unfinished feature movie. From this moment he will leave definitively the film tape to elaborate all his production on video, in analogical formats at the beginning and digital later. This activity always will be accompanied of a fervent defense of digital cinema and its suitability for the genres of fiction, opinion little extended for then.

Between 1995 and 1999 he writes and directs twelfth average of shorts. Three of them, Metaminds and Metabodies, Morfing and Welcome to Spain share a certain unit of style and of intention that will justify their meeting in the memorable DVD CODEX ATANICUS, edited in 2008. This trilogy of really strange and disturbing films constitute the wildest, controversial and, for calling it this way, underground stage of his career.

In 2000 he begins to shoot the dystopian science fiction feature movie FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions, which will not see the light until 2004. Produced totally independently, FAQ is an unusual work in the Spanish cinematography, so much for the way in which it is produced and distributed (totally apart from the industry), for the genre (science fiction, futurism, dystopia), and for the used language (French). After a brief but famous polemic with the Sitges Fantasy Film Festival, which refuses to project even out of contest, FAQ initiates an unstoppable career through international film festivals (there is one of the Spanish feature films most selected in the world in 2005), harvests excellent critiques in Europe and The United States and finally it falls down in hands of an indy films distributor from New York. Passed some years, FAQ has turned into obliged reference of the fantastic Spanish cinema and of the Sfi-Fi genre (specifically of that subgenre that is the dystopia) worldwide.

After an unsuccessful attempt of shooting a movie on the English magician Aleister Crowley (Perdurabo, of which he finished only 40 minutes), a project that he tries to take up again as soon as possible, Atanes moves to Riotinto's mines to submerge in the adventure of PROXIMA, a 116 min. space epic, his last feature movie to this day.

Since 2007 he lives in Madrid, and he has just finished his new feature movie, Maximum Shame (2010).




























Actresses Marina Gatell and Ariadna Ferrer under the iron rule of Carlos Atanes' direction
during the filming of Maximum Shame (January 2010)