Three investigations on film clubs, screenwriters and financing receive Berlanga 2026 Grants

The Film Academy selects three projects, among the 60 presented, as winners of the sixth edition of the Luis García Berlanga Research Grants.

The century of the Spanish Cineclub (1928-2028) A radical experience of cinema and community, by Alicia Thick Iron; Between the lines: women screenwriters during the Franco regime (1939-1975), by Lucía Rodríguez García de Herreros and Elena Oroz; and Decision-making processes in film investment: models, criteria and effects, by Andrés Longares, are the three projects chosen. Each one will benefit from aid of 12,000 euros for the development of research.

The selection committee was made up of the president of the Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite; the film historian and director of Filmoteca Española, Valeria Camporesi; the producer and member of the Board of Directors of the Academy, Piluca Baquero; the programmer Cecilia Barrionuevo; and the journalist and writer Luis Alegre.

The institution calls for these Grants in order to promote and support the development of research work that contributes to the knowledge of Spanish and Ibero-American cinematography.

• The century of the Spanish Cineclub (1928-2028) A radical experience of cinema and community

It proposes publishing an illustrated cartography of the historic Spanish Cineclub project, which ran from 1928 to 1930. The Cineclub was a collective phenomenon of participatory and performative encounter. It was the first film “festival” in our country that brought together Spanish avant-garde intellectuals for three seasons, uniting the generation of '98 with the young promise of the Silver Age. This activity provoked an experimental spirit in Spanish cinema, promoting an explosion of new emerging currents such as the surrealist. As stated, it served as a pedagogical platform, being the first “film school” in our country.

The research includes a stage where a practical experience is integrated, reconstructing the original programming with a sample of the 15 sessions that took place and the 80 historical films projected, along with selected proposals from current cinema. This project will be developed by Alicia Grueso Hierro, Cum Laude Doctor in the Art: Production and Research program at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV).

• Between the lines: Women screenwriters during the Franco regime (1939-1975)

The objective of this project is to offer a new look at the role of women in cinema during the Franco regime by analyzing the presence, trajectories and contributions of women screenwriters to Spanish cinema between 1939 and 1975. It thus proposes to recover names, biographies and scripts (including those that did not materialize), study themes, styles and genres, and examine their relationship with key institutions of the period - especially censorship - and the specific difficulties they faced to practice the profession in a dictatorial context and a extremely masculinized field such as cinema.

This research is developed by Lucía Rodríguez García de Herreros, professor of Audiovisual Communication at the University of Valencia, and by Elena Oroz, professor at the Department of Communication at the Carlos III University of Madrid. Both are part of the TECMERIN research group.

• Decision-making processes in film investment: models, criteria and effects

This research is based on the premise that all cinematography is a reflection of the investment decisions that finance it. The Españolada, the French New Wave, the cinema of the Hollywood studio system, the Danish Dogma of the nineties or the current platform cinema are cultural expressions inseparable from the economic systems that made them possible.

Understanding how film investment decisions are made is, deep down, understanding how a culture is built, because creative decisions depend directly on their viability to be produced. The objective of this project is to analyze how the design of decision-making processes in film financing influences the cultural, aesthetic and economic results of the cinema produced and, based on this analysis, propose a conceptual and methodological framework that allows optimizing said processes based on the cultural policy or return on investment objectives pursued. All from the hand of film producer Andrés Longares, who will develop this research.