Like a family without a photo album. A look at a possible Asturian national cinema

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to present a more or less chronological approach to the «New Asturian Cinema», from its origin at the beginning of the century to the present day, through its most representative titles (and filmmakers), with the objective of trying to define its main features, both formal and thematic. With the beginning of the new millennium, the film critic José Havel published a draft of a founding manifesto of what could be the «New Asturian Cinema» that claimed the possibility of a «specifically Asturian» cinema, that is: the development of a cinematographic perspective that he was capable of generating a «truly indigenous vision of reality, affirming and signifying our sociocultural identity». The critic from Oviedo called for the «cinematographic appearance of the Asturian identity, due to the configuration of an untransferable filmic personality intent on breaking topics, pointing out problems and dramatically formulating the conflicts in Asturies». What has happened twenty years later with that Asturian cinema that was targeted as possible in that improbable manifesto? You want to answer this question on the following pages. To achieve this I am going to try to answer many other questions: Can we currently talk about this «New Asturian Cinema»? Since when? What characteristics define it? What role does the Asturian language play in its development? How does the hegemony of the digital image influence our cinema? Why are the different languages of cinematographic non-fiction –among the narrative, the observational, the ethnographic, the essayistic, the autobiographical or the experimental– in recent times showing themselves as the only possible languages for this cinema? Which filmmakers represent you? What movies stand out? Given the importance that cinema continues to have in the processes of construction of collective memory and identity - memory and identity being two indissoluble concepts if what we want to talk about is the symbolic construction of a nation - the answer to all these questions places the subject in a central space for the present and the future of the country Key words: New Asturian Cinema, digital cinema, political cinema, identity, memory, self-production, class.