The film programmer, musician and author Fran Gayo | Culture | EUROtoday

The Asturian Fran Gayo has died in Buenos Aires this Thursday, the place he lived, at 55, sufferer of most cancers. Bonhomy power, an enthusiasm enlargement engine, Gayo’s legacy is intangible, and hundreds and hundreds of people that have seen over three many years have a movie session scheduled by him in festivals, cultural facilities and exhibitions, or who’ve learn or have heard some track of MUS. Until the tip, his spouse, the good Argentine filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler have accompanied him (Open doorways and home windows, who gained in Locarno in 2011, and The thought of ​​a lake) And his son Olmo.

Gayo was born in Gijón in 1970. Bachelor of Spanish Literature, between 1997 and 2009 he was liable for programming on the Gijón/Ficxixón International Film Festival, in the course of the route stage of José Luis Cienfuegos, years during which the Gijón contest triggered an earthquake within the European movie scene when it was capable of home the very best of the world’s unbiased cinema of concert events and occasions to its programming. In a rimbombante manner, within the media we offered it because the European Sunday, and it was most likely true, when Sundance nonetheless illuminated the trail of a dangerous cinema, with clever and sensible authorship.

Finished his first Asturian stage, in 2010 he moved to Buenos Aires to combine into the BAFICI workforce (International Independent Film Festival of Buenos Aires) till 2017. There additionally scheduled the animated Bafici (between 2012 and 2014), the Expotoons animation pageant (between 2010 and 2012) or the Spanish Spanish movie present throughout 5 editions. In flip, he was half, since 2011, of the contents acquisition workforce of the platform of video on demand QUBIT.TV. Since 2012, and till his demise, he was liable for movie content material on the Niemeyer Center, in Aviles.

In 2019, he was a part of the NFFF Programming workforce (International Fantastic Film Festival of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and, from 2021, of the GIFF (Geneva International Film Festival) as an advisor to Latin America and Spain. In addition, he cossed samples for the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Buenos Aires, the Filmoteca de Valencia (IVAC), the Transcinema Festival (Peru), the Cultural Center of Spain in Buenos Aires or the National Museum of Fine Arts of Argentina. For two years, in 2016 and 2017, in an journey during which not even his everlasting enthusiasm might with all of the stones that have been crammed in his manner, he was liable for the inventive route of the International Film Festival of Ourense (Ouff).

Return to Gijón

In 2020 and till final 12 months, he returned to work on the Gijón Festival, now led by Alejandro Díaz Castaño, till in 2024, his forces diminished, he modeled a number of conferences and press wheels however left the work of programming to Tito Rodríguez. In its first version he took a pandemic contest ahead that was a luxurious for Spanish cinephiles. “The trade of programming,” he wrote, “to design a content proposal to be shown to a more or less specialized audience implies a series of commitments and a permanent reformulation of criteria. It also implies an efforted exercise that, in recent years, has been further extreme,” for the sophisticated cultural administration in these final 5 years, one thing that he did rigorously, curiosity and keenness.

In the nineties, he was a part of one other large cultural motion of northern Spain, the Xixon Sound, by forming with Monica Vacas the Mus duo, which opted for intimate melodies and letters in Bable, in contrast to her era companions, who did it predominantly in English. So if within the cinema I supported the indie, In music was contained in the artistic indie Spanish on the finish of the century. Like Mus, after two EP as Zuma (1997) y Pigaz (1998), his first album arrived, Fai, All at all times based mostly on selfmade manufacturing, cows voice, homosexual keyboards and navigation between electronics and a folks of Anglo -Saxon descent. In each the US and in Asia a number of compilations have been revealed with their work, whereas in Spain their different albums have been edited: the EP Alma (2000), with which Mus settled in a folks Melancholic, and albums Divine Light (2004) y Life (2007), on a creative journey during which his music was full of gentle, with out abandoning the Asturian in his lyrics. After ending Mus’s journey, he would nonetheless consider melodies: in 2009 he revealed the album The subsequent harvests.

And on the tour of its inventive half, literary continues to be lacking: after two poems with good vital echo, he launched a novel, Christmas wolves (2022), a e-book that needed to be a horror story and ended molten with an outline of three generations of Asturians, a portrait of racism in its hometown and life by way of a alter ego unlucky of the creator. “When I wanted to realize, my grandmother, her ghost, was already in the book. And at that time, she began to transform into something else,” he informed this newspaper in his publication. The novel was based mostly on the fact, very onerous, of the Vaqueiros de Alzada, who made a residing with the cattle, with which they climbed into the inside mountains and in winter they went all the way down to the brañas close to the coast. “I have always obsessed me to imagine my family’s life before I appeared. And that includes the odyssey of those people who end up adapting to the cities of the sixties and seventy … without the classism being diluted. I believe that the class identity is born there. Not only because of the conviction that breasts at home, but for what you see of brutal economic differences […]. Now, in Argentina I see him again: from the circle that surrounds me his father was a worker. That places you in a separate place, and can never be forgotten. ”It was, in flip, a combat towards the oblivion of the lived:“ With my moving to the center of the cities, with my transfer to Buenos Aires, I have dealsonalized. When I return to Xijón, and I approach my streets of childhood, there is nothing left. That is why I had to write, and capture that this was important and that it was not pretty. I don’t believe the sweet nostalgia exercises. ”

There is one thing to say of Fran: it was by no means cynical, he at all times sailed moved by enthusiasm, which contaminated and hit his interlocutor. The passionate of his strategy to tradition was born, sure, from nice instinct and rigor, understanding that in the long run there was a spectator. And subsequently, subsequent to him, he discovered from cinema and life. From his in 2022 he mirrored: “Music was the first. Things that in Spain would not have dared. ”