Richard Shpuntoff and Serge Garcia are the two filmmakers selected for the second edition of the annual Joaquim Jordà residency program, supported by Doclisboa, FIDMarseille and the Reina Sofia Museum. Chosen by the jury from a pool of over 150 applications, the two fellows will form part of the program that pays tribute to Spanish filmmaker Joaquim Jordà (1935-2006) and aims to promote the development of film projects in the field of non-fiction cinema.
Richard Shpuntoff was awarded, in the words of the jury, “for a work located between writing, memory and personal archive, a writer’s cinema that takes into account translation and dislocation as essential phenomena in the narrative”. Shpuntoff was born in New York and began his career in the visual arts as a documentary photographer. As a director, he made more than a dozen short films before making his feature debut with Jackson Heights (2016), about the murder of a Puerto Rican sex worker in 1990 in New York. Everything that Is Forgotten in an Instant, his second film, premiered in 2020 in the International Competition of FIDMarseille.
Serge Garcia is a writer, filmmaker and producer whose work explores intersectional narratives and key subjects in the musical subcultures of clubbing, electronica or noise. For the jury, “his films summon feelings of loneliness, alienation, but also resistance and agency”. In its existentialist twist to the musical documentary, Grand Central Hotel (2021) stands out as a melancholic and astute portrait of sound creator Terre Thaemlitz. Other films by Garcia are Live To Be Legend (2020), Cycle One (2021) and A General Disappointment (2022).
The jury, whose members underlined “the maturity and inventiveness of the projects” competing for the fellowships, was composed by Cíntia Gil and Miguel Ribeiro (Doclisboa), Tsveta Dobreva and Cyril Neyrat (FIDMarseille), Chema González and Manuel Segade (Museo Reina Sofia), and Manuel Asín (independent juror).
