10th Americana festival celebrates American indie movies in Barcelona March 7-12

The tenth edition of Americana – a film festival celebrating North American indie movies – will take place in Barcelona cinemas from March 7 to 12. 

A total of 36 feature films and 32 shorts will be screened at Girona, Zumzeig and Phenomena cinemas, beginning with Laura Poitras' All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The documentary was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and is nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars. 

For those who cannot wait until March 7 to get their indie movie buzz, the festival has teamed up with Filmoteca to put on a Todd Solondz retrospective, beginning on Tuesday, February 28 with a screening of Wiener-Dog, a 2016 spin-off from the director's 1995 film Welcome to the Dollhouse. 

Tops, Docs, Next and Shorts 

Feature films are classified into three sections: Tops, Docs and Next. 

The Tops category includes two Canadian movies, Falcon Lake by newcomer Charlotte Le Bon and Riceboy Sleeps by Anthony Shim, as well as War Pony, a film by Gina Gammell and Riley Keough (Elvis Presley's granddaughter) that portrays young members of the Oglala Lakota tribe on a reservation in Nebraska. It won the Camera d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.  

The Docs section includes eight films this year, including All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Another Oscar-nominated documentary, All That Breathes by Shaunak Sen, which won awards at Cannes and Sundance, is also being screened. 

The Next category contains ten films highlighting new American independent cinema, including The Unknown Country by Morrisa Maltz and Unidentified Objects by Juan Felipe Zuleta. 

Finally, the Shorts section features screenings of several award winning and Oscar nominated short films. Among the highlights are If I Go Will They Miss Me, awarded Best Fiction Short at Sundance, and Stranger than Rotterdam with Sara Driver, which won the Special Jury Award at the same festival.# 

Todd Solondz: "It's important to be impolite" 

US filmmaker Todd Solondz will be in attendance at the screening of Wiener-Dog on Tuesday, the first in a series of his films to be shown at Filmoteca until March 15: Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998), Storytelling (2001), Palindromes (2004), Life During Wartime (2009) and Dark Horse (2011).  

At a press conference in Barcelona, Solondz spoke out against restrictions on freedom of speech. 

"It's very important to be polite and civil in society, but as a filmmaker it's important to be impolite," he said. "There are always restrictions, but they are a little bit more severe today and a lot of people are scared of being canceled." 

"My lawyer says I'm virtually canceled," he joked. 

Tickets at Americana cost €6 for feature films, €4 for shorts, with a 6-film festival pass costing €35. More information at americanafilmfest.com.