Skip to main content

Javier Fesser Biography

Javier Fesser

(Javier Fesser Pérez de Petinto; Madrid, 1964) Spanish filmmaker.After filming two remarkable comedies, he gained notoriety with the drama Camino (2008), a controversial film for its vision of religious fanaticism that won six Goya Awards in 2009.

Born in the Womb From a family with artistic concerns, Javier Fesser enrolled in naval engineering; Then he changed his studies for communication sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid, although he would not get a degree either.In 1986 he created Línea Films, a company dedicated to making advertising spots, from which he developed campaigns for brands such as Telefónica or BMW.In 1992 he founded, with Luis Manso, the Pendelton Film production company, with the idea of ​​alternating advertising production with film production.

Javier Fesser

A at the same time that the television campaigns followed, Fesser began his journey in the cinema with the direction of short films.His debut could not have been more encouraging: his first short, Aquel ritmillo (1994), in which the dreamlike universe that would characterize his future productions is already appreciated, was his first great success, in addition to his first I work with one of his fetish actors, Luis Ciges. Aquel ritmillo won the Goya award for the best short fiction film in 1995, as well as the awards for the best short film at the Peñíscola Comic Film Festival (Castellón) and the audience at the European Film Festival of Angers (France).This first short was followed shortly after by El secdleto de la tlompeta (1995), a disconcerting narrative labyrinth with which Fesser corroborated his talent for directing and which was awarded in Clermont-Ferrand (France) and in Regensburg (Germany).

In 1998 Fesser presented his first feature film, El milagro de P.Tinto , a hilarious surrealist film with a script by Fesser himself and his brother Guillermo ( member of the humor group Gomaespuma).The film, starring Luis Ciges, was one of the box office successes of the season, with more than 1.3 million viewers, and made it known to the general public.It won the Goya award for the best special effects and was one of the nominees by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the category of best new direction.

At the dawn of the new century, Fesser created the Notodofilmfest festival, a competition for short films published on the Internet and which in 2009 reached its eighth edition.He signed the short film The little surprise and the fourteen-chapter series for the network Javi and Lucy ; released in December 2000, it exceeded two million downloads.He soon embarked on what would be his second film, The Great Adventure of Mortadelo and Filemón (2003), an adaptation-also with his brother Guillermo-of the popular comic book characters created by Francisco Ibáñez.Backed by his debut feature and by the popularity of Ibáñez's strips, success was immediate, and the film became one of the highest grossing in the history of Spanish cinema, with 5.5 million viewers.He also obtained five Goya awards (best editing, best artistic direction, best production direction, best special effects and best makeup and hairdressing).

After this blazing success, Fesser changed his third to undertake a charity project.He signed, with Chus Gutiérrez, Patricia Ferreira, Pere Joan Ventura and Javier Corcuera, the collective documentary In the world at a time , five stories that addressed the five priorities of Unicef.The result of their contribution was Binta y la gran idea (2004), a short shot in various locations on the banks of the Casamance, in southern Senegal, which emphasized the need to educate girls.In Senegal, he would also compile material for another production, Zero Seven (2005), a particular update of Don Quijote de la Mancha commissioned by the Ingenio 400 project. Binta y la gran idea received critical acclaim and was nominated for the Oscar for best short film in the 2007 edition.

In 2005, Fesser also directed the short film The cabin and published the short novel Three days in the Valley.My Benedictine experience .The following year he was the scriptwriter of Cándida , a film with the one that his brother Guillermo made his film debut.After the commercial successes of his first two feature films, Javier Fesser decided to take a radical turn in his cinematographic career and undertook what to date has been his most ambitious project: Camino .

Camino (2008)

The director (this time also a screenwriter, producer and editor) addressed the case of a girl in this film sick with cancer whose mother, an Opus Dei activist, tries to make her see that her illness is a blessing from God.Inspired by the real case of Alexia González-Barros (and also in others, as he would have to clarify later), the film was presented in the official section of the San Sebastián Festival, where it was widely supported by critics.It premiered on October 17, 2008 and sparked a heated controversy when the Opus Dei Information Office in Spain accused the director of "distorting" reality and offering a "false and manipulated" X-ray of the institution.Likewise, the minor's family publicly disagreed with the development of the film, and asked Fesser to explicitly clarify that the girl did not die as the film says (with applause and a sour priest shouting).

The truth is that the director had to issue a statement in which he recalled that the tape was a fiction and that the real events on which it was inspired "belong to several cases" and not just Alexia's." Camino -he said-aims to be an objective story, without prejudice or stereotypes." Despite the controversy raised and not starting as a favorite, Camino was the great winner of the 2009 Goya Awards, awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Spain, obtaining six of the seven awards To which it was nominated: best film, direction, leading actress (Carme Elías), supporting actor (Jordi Dauder), revelation actress (Nerea Camacho), original script and special effects.It had previously won the award for best film at the XIX José María Forqué Film Awards.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Domingo Fernández Navarrete Biography

Domingo Fernández Navarrete (Peñafiel, 1610-Santo Domingo, 1698) Spanish theologian and missionary.Dominico (1630), missionary in the Philippines (1646) and prefect of the Dominican missions in China (1664), took part in the Canton conference on Chinese rites (1668), in which he opposed the Jesuits.At his death, he was bishop of Santo Domingo.He wrote about the Chinese missions and religious writings in the Chinese language.

Edouard Balladur Biography

Édouard Balladur (Smyrna, 1929) French politician.Born in Smyrna into a family of bankers of Armenian origin, Édouard Balladur studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence and graduated from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. His political career began in the early 1960s.Technical adviser in Pompidou's cabinet from 1966 to 1968, the Prime Minister entrusted him with relations with the unions.Between 1969 and 1974 he was Secretary General to President Pompidou.Considered the shadow mastermind of that government, Balladur served as de facto president during Pompidou's long agony. After his death, he rejected the post of ambassador to the Vatican proposed by Valery Giscard d'Estaing and went on to work for a private company.In 1977 he was appointed president-director of General de Servicios Informáticos and in 1980, president of the European Accumulator Company.In 1984 he was appointed Councilor of State, and in the legislative elections of March 16, 198...

Edouard Manet Biography

Édouard Manet (Paris, 1832-id., 1883) French painter and printmaker.Son of an important civil servant of the Ministry of Justice, Édouard Manet was a mediocre student interested only in drawing.Faced with paternal resistance to starting an artistic career, he tried unsuccessfully to enter the Naval Academy until, after a second failed attempt, his family reluctantly agreed to finance his artistic studies, which began in 1850 in the workshop of the classical painter Thomas Couture. Édouard Manet After six years of apprenticeship, Édouard Manet established himself in his own studio.In those early days he established a relationship with artists and writers such as Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas and Charles Baudelaire.At the beginning of 1860 some of his works began to be recognized, which deserved, among others, the warm reception of the critic and writer Théophile Gautier. In his production at the end of the 1870s he accentuated the naturalism of his subject matter, to give th...

Álvaro de Albornoz Liminiana Biography

Álvaro de Albornoz Liminiana (Luarca, 1879-Mexico, 1954) Spanish politician and writer.In 1929, together with Marcelino Domingo, he intervened in the founding of the Radical Socialist Party.He was Minister of Development and Justice of the Second Republic and President of the Republican Government in exile (1945-1946).

Edouard Mortier Biography

Édouard Mortier (Édouard Adolphe Casimir Joseph Mortier, Duke of Treviso; Cateau-Cambrésis, 1768-Paris, 1835) French military.He entered the militia in 1791 and with the rank of Marshal of France (1805) he intervened with the Napoleonic armies in Spain, where he participated in the second siege of Zaragoza and obtained the victory of Ocaña (1809).After the Hundred Days, he recognized Louis XVIII.With Luis Felipe, he was President of the Council and Minister of War (1834).He died the victim of an attack suffered by King Luis Felipe.

Édouard Claparède Biography

Édouard Claparède (Geneva, 1873-1940) Swiss psychologist and pedagogue.After attending university studies in Switzerland, Germany and France, Édouard Claparède returned to his hometown, where he began his pedagogical career at the University of Geneva, where he became a professor at the Faculty of Psychology.In his theories, pedagogy and child psychology were consolidated in close relation, which led him to organize a seminar on Educational Psychology in 1906.Six years later, in 1912, he founded the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, today the Institute of Sciences of The education. Édouard Claparède His work contributed greatly to making Geneva the center of modern European pedagogy.His main pedagogical concern was to achieve an active school, in which the need and interest of the child prevailed, achieving the creation of a school tailored to the student.For this he took the ideas and concepts of psychology to apply them to pedagogy; Thus, he proposed that teachers learn to obse...

Edward fitzgerald Biography

Edward Fitzgerald (Edward Purcell; Bredfield, 1809-Merton Rectory, Norfolk, 1883) English poet and translator.He is the author of the philosophical dialogue Euphranor (1851) and a Collection of apothegms and axioms (1852), but he is known, above all, for his adaptation of the Rubaiyat by the Persian poet Omar Jayyam (1859). Edward Fitzgerald Of aristocratic lineage, Edward Fitzgerald was educated at Trinity Cambridge College, where he befriended Alfred Tennyson (who dedicated his poem Tiresias to him), William Makepeace Thackeray, James Spedding and WB Donne, graduating in 1830; later he would study Spanish and Persian privately.He lived a lonely country lord existence in Suffolk, Woodbridge, or the surrounding area; He only moved from there on the occasion of a few periodic trips to London and alternated literary activity with gardening and yachting.An eccentric character, he was a brilliant correspondent and maintained a close literary relationship with Thomas Carlyle ...

Gregorio ferro Biography

Gregorio Ferro (Gregorio Ferro Requeijo; Santa María de Lamas, 1744-Madrid, 1812) Spanish painter.He was a chamber painter and general director of the Academia de San Fernando.His style is influenced by Mengs ( Sagrada Familia , The Count of Floridablanca ). Gregorio Ferro began painting techniques in Santiago de Compostela (La Coruña), under the tutelage of a Benedictine monk.He then moved to Madrid, where he was a disciple of Felipe de Castro, Corrado Giaquinto and Antonio Rafael Mengs, successively.He studied at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and already in the 1760 Academy contest he won third prize, after Ramón Bayeu and Francisco de Goya, who won the first and second respectively. At the Academy of San Fernando he held the positions of lieutenant director (1788), director (1797) and director general (1804), and he was appointed chamber painter of Carlos IV.Little known but appreciable is his facet as an engraver and illustrator: he illustrated part of t...

Heinrich maier Biography

Heinrich Maier (Heidenheim, 1867-Berlin, 1933) German philosopher.He produced a "critical realism", along the lines of H.Driesch.He is the author, among other works, of Aristotle's syllogistics (1896-1900) and of The philosophy of reality (1926-1935).

Harry Lloyd Hopkins Biography

Harry Lloyd Hopkins (Sioux City, 1890-New York, 1946) American politician.He was a Roosevelt collaborator from his time as governor of New York.During his presidency he was one of the promoters of economic recovery and its representative in Europe during World War II.