Juan José Mendy, founder of Iskra, Second Chomón Prize of the Academy

The Film Academy, which grants this award to companies or people whose technical contributions contribute to the development of the film industry, focuses on José Mendy "for his work in the restoration, recovery and dissemination of film heritage in Spain."

The founder of Iskra, a company dedicated to the production of cinematographic tricks and the recovery of our film heritage, Juan José Mendy Igoa, is the recipient of the Second Chomón Prize 2013, an award that the Film Academy grants each year to companies or people whose technical contributions contribute to the development of the film industry. The award, which will be presented on April 17, at the institution's headquarters, has gone in this edition to this Uruguayan artisan "for his work in the restoration, recovery and dissemination of film heritage in Spain."

The recognition has made Mendy “very excited,” and he dedicates it to his team (made up of four people) “and to the Film Archives that commission us to work,” says this frequent collaborator of almost all the film archives in our country.

To talk about the recovery of celluloid heritage in Spain is to talk about Mendy and Iskra, a company he created in 1974. "Things have changed a lot. Thanks to the technical means we have, our work is now much easier. Before we had neither knowledge nor capacity," adds this veteran professional who has restored more than 200 films, including The Spirit of the Beehive. "It was the most complicated because the negative was destroyed. Furthermore, it is a work of art and had to be pampered," says Mendy, who is especially fond of the recovery of Furtivos. “What we did was so appreciated, especially Borau, who sent me a very affectionate letter.”

Recognized by the profession – “another thing is the general public, which does not know what the trick is” – he hopes that Chomón's Segundo will translate into greater knowledge of his work. “It is a very special award because, in addition, we have restored more than eight titles by this pioneer of fantasy and animated cinema.”

Two titles from the beginning of the Franco regime from the Filmoteca Española, Union news bulletin number 4 y Cordoba bullfighters, focus Mendy's attention at the moment. "Our cinematographic heritage, which exists, is in good health. Most of it has disappeared, it has been lost. From 1946 to 1956 there are several films that nobody knows anything about."

Mendy, for whom the relationships between cinema and heritage “only exist through Film Archives, which are the greatest defenders because they are the ones that search, find and care for”, was a young man in the film club and remembers how much he was impressed by Hitchcock's Special Envoy, so much so that he got hooked on cinema when he was only 9 years old.
Now, at 69, this craftsman who left Uruguay and came to Spain to study production at the Film School, keeps his enthusiasm for “recovering films” intact. The producer remained a project when he joined Borau's company, El Imán, and started doing some tricks. “And since I wasn't bad at it…”

His daughter lends him a hand, but she will not follow in his footsteps "because there is little market here," says Mendy, who enjoys "good movies, it doesn't matter if they are old or from two days ago."

It does not go into figures, but it does highlight that the most expensive film that has been recovered so far has been Furtivos. “We had to rebuild the image and sound, it cost almost 100,000 euros, and it took us 4 months and a week.” If he could, he would restore his first commission, El mayorazgo de Bastarretxe, "because now we could do it much better. I saw it recently and we didn't do it badly", and he would get to work on My dear young lady, in whose filming he participated.

He says that being a restorer is "very big" for him, that he is a recuperator "because we do not manipulate, we do not intervene directly within the work. We could change José Luis López Vázquez's mustache, but what we do is change the bad conditions of a film for good ones."

In previous editions, this trophy for technical contributions has been recipients of the brothers Alfredo and Andrés Vallés, Juan Mariné, Emilio Ruíz del Río, the Valero family, Luis Castro, Julián Martín, Josep A. Esteve Torres, Santiago Gordo, Ricardo Navarrete, the Madrid company Next Limit Technologies –Víctor González and Ignacio Vargas–, the veteran hairdresser Antoñita, Ruíz's widow, the Val Archive del Omar and the post-production company SGO.

Segundo de Chomón (Teruel, 1871 – Paris, 1929) was one of the great pioneers of fantasy and animated cinema. His numerous tricks and optical illusions appeared in European blockbusters and he explored the possibilities of stop motion.