Frederick Elmes (Lynch DOP), at the Las Palmas Festival

Frederick Elmes, director of photography of such iconic David Lynch feature films as 'Eraserhead', 'Blue Velvet' and 'Wildheart', will be part of the 24th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, which will take place from April 25 to May 4.

“Having the presence of Frederick Elmes is not bringing in another collaborator among the many that David Lynch had,” he highlights. Luis Miranda, director of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival. Elmes was the director of photography for eraser head, Lynch's first full-length, and blue velvet, “which is surely the film with which Lynch invents himself and with which his world appears to be fully configured.” And he also signed the photography direction of wild heart, “the most visually intense work, and in which perhaps Lynch most thoroughly demonstrated his vocation for painting with the camera, as he himself used to declare.”

Elmes, who has also worked with John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmush, Charlie Kaufmann, Todd Solondz, John Turturro o Ang Lee, will be received at the Festival as a figure “who has been at the center of North American independent cinema for the last forty years.” At a programmatic level, the Canarian festival will dedicate a extensive retrospective in which an important selection of titles that have ended up forming part of the visual imagination of American cinema will be screened.

The appearance of the director of photography is the finishing touch to a program closely linked to the cinema of David Lynch. Beyond having a room set in its particular universe, the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival will have meetings with intellectuals and filmmakers close to its legacy: the film critic and writer Quim Casas, the writer and director of the New York Festival Dennis Lim, the film director Nacho Vigalondo and the film critic Violeta Kovacsics.

The opening, which will feature a master of ceremonies with tables on the subject, El Gran Wyoming, will recreate Lynch's sonorous atmosphere using the filmmaker's main composer: Angelo Badalementi. Thanks to the collaboration with the Tenerife Film Music Festival (Fimucité), the opening, in addition to an approach to the contents of the contest and its sections, will feature a peculiar concert tribute to the North American musician who worked alongside the director on numerous occasions: Blue Velvet (1986), Wild Heart (1990), Twin Peaks (serie 1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), Lost Highway (1996), A true story (1999) o Mulholland Drive (2001).

The tributes from the Canary Islands competition will be completed with a retrospective dedicated to Gena Rowlands and Gene Hackman, which will feature such notable titles as A woman under the influence by John Cassavetes (USA, 1974) and Gloria by John Cassavetes (USA, 1980), in the case of Rowlands, and The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola (USA, 1974) and French Connection. Against the drug empire by William Friedkin (USA, 1971), with Hackman. In such a singular tribute there will be no shortage Another Woman by Woody Allen (USA, 1988), a film that brings together the two great performers.

An extensive program to establish itself as a state reference

On Monday, April 27, the Official Section of the Festival with ten feature films which come backed by prestigious awards from international festivals such as Locarno, Venice, Berlin or Sundance. Documentaries, comedies and some thrillers make this section, according to the selectors, one of the most open and varied sections in recent years. And, for programmer Jaime Pena, the word “contrast” is (…) “a perfect guide that allows us to go through the ten films that this year compete for the Lady Harimaguada de Oro”: Holy Electricity (This Kotetishvili), Lesson Learned (Bálint Szimler), Cactus Pears (Rohan Parashuram Kanawade), One of Those Days When Hemme Dies (Murat Fıratoğlu), Seeds (Brittany Shyne), Two Women (Chloé Robichaud), Stone Gods (Ángel Santos and Iván Castiñeiras Gallego), Greek (Ameer Fakher Eldin), Blind Love (Julian Chou) y The Fifth (Silvina Shnicer). On the other hand, the 15 short films, divided into three sessions, will offer a portrait of the moment the format is experiencing. For its programmer, Andrea Patru, many of them “bet on the look, or sometimes on the vision.”

On the other hand, the section Spain Panorama will be presented in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria as an open window to an independent, different and exquisite cinema thanks to “the wealth of our young and restless authors and their desire to explore further in search of new film frontiers,” says programmer Elodie Mellado in the catalog text. Six feature films and three shorts will show the public “the uniqueness of Spanish cinema.” In parallel, the last of the competitive sections, Band Apart, will show the journey of three filmmakers from the Archipelago who grew up under the protection of the Festival in Canarias Cinema: Samuel Delgado and Helena Girón, as co-directors, and Cayetana H. Cuyás. A hundred-headed dragon, the short of the first, and the feature film The meadow and the moon by Cuyás are part of the most experimental selection and can be seen together in a session of a section that is as intimate as it is poetic and that, in 2025, also shows two works that could be part of the “imaginary of a cinema queer", states the coordinator of Banda Apart, Antonio Weinrichter: these would be Sirens Call y In the sun, far from the center.

The programming of the 24th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival is completed with Camera Obscura, silent film screenings with live music; Already seen, which will premiere in Spain the restoration of two great works by Masumura; the section Panorama, which presents the most unique production that has toured festivals during the current year and the previous one; The Night + Freak, defined as the most hooligan section of the festival, and The Magic Lantern, which will screen titles that have as protagonists two girls who see the world in their own way: Pipi Longstocking and Frida Kahlo.