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.
Patricia Alemany
