The Film Academy presents the Elías Querejeta Award to Andrés Santana in San Sebastián

Within the framework of the San Sebastián Film Festival, producer Andrés Santana has received the Elías Querejeta Award, which in its first edition was presented to him by the president of the Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite.

Méndez-Leite stressed at the event that "Querejeta said that you have to choose well the film projects you embark on, because a piece of life goes with them. Producers know well the anguish and sleeplessness that the stories that reach the big screen contain; also the creativity, talent and good work that they require. Filmmakers need support at the height of their dreams, and the Board of Directors of the Academy was clear that, if there is a active producer who represents that commitment is Andrés Santana.

Excited, Santana, who thanked the institution that the first Elías Querejeta Award, a recognition of producers who take risks in the creative development of their craft, betting on the internationalization of Spanish cinema and the careers of new filmmakers, went to him, recalled the lunch in which the Basque producer asked him how he had gotten into cinema, a medium with which he fell in love watching The nightingale of the peaks, with Joselito, although the film for which he decided to dedicate himself “to making films” was The grapes of wrath, they John Ford.

When Santana told him that, due to his passion for the seventh art, he left his homeland, the Canary Islands – in its cinemas he saw Western films, Roman films, comedies, and in arthouse theaters he discovered Italian neorealism and films “that many called strange” from French, Japanese, Chinese cinema… – and moved to Madrid, where he held numerous jobs – book seller, waiter, extra, production assistant, associate producer, production manager…, Querejeta told him: 'You remind me a little of the boy Cinema Paradiso’.

"I told him that we were very different. But in 2012, the day after the tribute they paid me in my town, a newspaper published the headline 'Yesterday I saw the boy of Cinema Paradiso', and I thought that maybe Elías was right. We were not the same, but we did have the same dreams: making movies,” said the producer of The Astonished King, Numbered Days, Carol's Journey, Secrets of the Heart, Mararía, Blackthorn: No Destiny y Nobody wants the night, among other titles.

For Santana, who also appears in the credits of Going down to the Moor, After so many years, The journey to nowhere, Labyrinth of passions, The holy innocents, The escape from Segovia y First film, the prize awarded is also "for my mother, to whom I apologized for the harm I did her when I went to Madrid without telling her the truth - at which point her voice broke -; for Elías; for my two children; for the women who have shared my life; for my entire family for their unconditional support; and for the people I have met in this wonderful world and to whom I owe the little that I am next to Elías Querejeta," indicated the winner, who cited Diego Galán and Manuel Pérez Estremera, “two good friends of this festival who have left.”

Montxo Armendáriz, Enrique González Macho, Puy Oria, Mariano Barroso, Cristina Zumárraga, Marta Miró and the vice presidents of the Film Academy, Rafael Portela and Susi Sánchez, among others, joined the tribute to Andrés Santana, who, via video, received congratulations from Imanol Uribe, Manolo Gutiérrez Aragón, Gracia Querejeta, Isabel Coixet, Mateo Gil, Goya Toledo and Sigfrid Monleon.