Interview with Adela Burgos, co-founder and associate of Contrapicado



            What is Contrapicado and how did it start?

Contrapicado are 3 moviegoers doing all kinds of activities related to movies and audio-visual arts. We are three friends who all studied something related to the audio-visual world. We got together to create a cultural association through which to disseminate short films in Guadalajara (Spain). We then diversified into training children and adults, and producing our own short films and short videos on demand.
          A start-up company from a small town in Spain that devotes time to encouraging culture, local activities and trade does not sound like the typical international company. However, just as an example, you always add subtitles to your short films and videos [something that TranslatorsVillage loves, of course]. Are there any specific reason for that?

We think that whatever we do is applicable everywhere, here and abroad. We want to give the opportunity to everyone around the world to understand our work. All our members have travelled quite a lot and even lived outside Spain, so we have friends, acquaintances and family around the world, which has greatly influenced our decision to do multilingual versions of our work. We started subtitling only in English to avoid having to upload a separate video per language with subtitles; but now there are ways to put subtitles in different languages ​​on one single video, something that we will implement soon, no doubt about it.

                 What challenges have you found to make your work understood in other languages?

We have been fortunate to have professional support. Our dialogues are generally quite colloquial and we would not have managed to translate certain expressions without the support of this person.

                 This is not the only thing you internationality, also you organize international festivals…

Yes, especially in the last year, we were invited to bring a couple of international events to Guadalajara. We found it very interesting to show in such a small town something being viewed simultaneously across the world and we linked the projects and organized both the festival Future Shorts as The Shortest Day. Both were run in different cities in Spain and across the world.
                  How did you communicate with all these festivals (in other languages ​​)?

The festivals are organized in other countries but have representatives in each country. In the case of Spain we are not the country organizers, so we've been fortunate to not have to deal with the language barrier: we received all instructions in Spanish.

                  TranslatorsVillage members have attended your festival and we know that many of the short films are in VO. What is your experience?

Yes, these organizations provide a selection of worldwide short films with different forms of filmmaking and they are all subtitled. We love watching subtitled original versions; being alternative cinema films plus countries with minority languages, these festivals make the subtitled version available. Otherwise they would be impossible to find. The audience likes them because they know it is an international event and they expect to have original subtitled versions.
                 What is your vision of the future?
We aim to continue growing so we can bring more innovative events and make exchanges with like-minded groups in other countries to promote short films and festivals. We plan to translate our webpages into English and French shortly.

More information at: http://contrapicado.es

Patricia Alemany

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