SECTIONS // OFFICIAL COMPETITION FEATURE LENGTH

BUGARACH

Ventura Durall, Salvador Sunyer, Sergi Cameron
90' / 2014 / Germany, Spain
French
English and spanish subtitled

Audience vote 6.82

Bugarach is a tiny village in southern France where everyone lives a quiet life, isolated from the world; until the day that the international media spreads the news that Bugarach is the only place that will allegedly survive doomsday.
The arrival of increasingly outlandish strangers soon begins to disturb the local population. The mayor tries to take control of the situation, but it's already too late; furthermore, he has helped to blow up the story himself. We can see the consequences in the different characters that the documentary accompanies: Slide, the magician boy who sees the event as a great opportunity to become famous; Uranie, a millennarian who has a plan for his salvation; Mirko, a boy obsessed with weapons who wants to protect the village; and Monsieur Pouce, a scholar who knows everything about the region and who claims to have located the body of Christ underneath the mountain.
All these characters, along with the hunters and farmers of the village and the people who come to either save themselves or out of simple curiosity, are unfolding a landscape of existential emptiness that each one of them faces out of fear or in order to fill the void with the new values of modernism: fame, greed or the wildest beliefs.

Main Festivals & Awards

Visions du Reél, Nyon - World Premiere: April 26, 2014
Hot Docs, Toronto - North-American Premiere: April 29, 2014

Director's Biography

VENTURA DURALL, BARCELONA, 1974
An established director and producer, Durall’s latest short film, The Hidden Smile, was in Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival this year and has been awarded Best Short Film in more than 15 international film festivals. He is currently developing a feature-length film on the same subject. In 2009, his feature-length documentary Forgiveness was selected in such festivals as IDFA, DOKLEIPZIG, THESSALONIKA or DOCSDF and awarded Best Documentary at the Belgrade International Documentary Festival, the Audience Award at the Mon-doc International Documentary Festival, and garnered recognition as the Silver Award Winner at World Media Festival. Fiction feature The Two Lives of Andrés Rabadán has won, among other laurels, the Best European Independent Film in 2009 at the ECU Festival in Paris, the Grand Jury Prize at the Annecy Spanish Cinema Biennal in 2010, three Gaudí Awards from the Catalan Film Academy in 2010, and screened at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

Durall produced the above and other projects under the banner NANOUK FILMS, the production company he founded in 2000 with the intention of creating a benchmark artistic platform in the Catalan and European audiovisual scene and of establishing new communication channels between the documentary arena and fiction films. Durall also teaches at the Barcelona film school ESCAC where he is Head of the Documentary Department.

SERGI CAMERON, BARCELONA, 1987
Graduated from the ESCAC film school in 2007, Sergi has focused his career on directing movies such as "Cosas extrañas que brillan", “OVIS”, "How great it is to have a moustache" and video clips for many bands. Additionally, he has worked as an editor in movies like "The 5th Chromosome", "The Afterlife," "Le Cordon", "Limbo Starr: Diez cuenta atrás” and commercials. He combines his work in the visual field with musical projects, he composes and
records soundtracks and he dedicates himself to music journalism.

SALVADOR SUNYER, GIRONA, 1987
Graduated from ESCAC specialising in documentaries. He further specialised in directing short films and artistic advertising which received numerous awards. He has a close relationship with the world of international theatre and circus and has made several audiovisuals for the works of big international names like Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Pau Miró and Alex Rigola, the director of the Venice Theatre Biennale. He directed several documentaries such as “Veïns” (2009), “Porcs”(2009), “Migranland” (2013) which is currently in the editing room, and ”Conquering LA” (2014) which is currently shot.

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