Pablo La Parra: "The Filmoteca cannot afford dogmatic absolutisms, they are an aristocratic privilege"

BarcelonaTwo years ago, Pablo la Parra (Gandia, 1987) took over from Esteve Riambau as director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya, a period that has allowed him to begin to deploy a transformative project that has already made its mark with programming that is increasingly open and permeable to contemporary concerns. In conversation with l’ARA, the Valencian researcher takes stock of his management at the head of the center.

When he presented his project he stressed the need to “put the idea of change and transformation at the center”. What has changed at the Filmoteca in these two years?

— Many, and at all levels. From a programming perspective, we are consolidating a greater diversity of cinematic expressions: programming experiments that are working very well, such as the Passos dobles cycle, a program like Les Golfes that delves into B-movie and genre subcultures, or the Japanese animation retrospective, which was a public demand. All of this has translated into greater audience diversity, which has tangibly rejuvenated. And in the field of conservation, there are also innovations, such as the acquisition of the photochemical laboratory that consolidates our capacity to preserve film heritage and, of course, the approval of the law for the National Film Archive of Catalonia.

Not only is the Filmoteca changing, but also cinema and audiovisual. The vast majority of films do not have an analog copy, and part of the production goes directly to platforms. How is the Filmoteca adapting to these changes?

— The Filmoteca is already taking care of Catalan film production with a digital long-term preservation system absolutely adapted to international standards for long-term conservation. In parallel, public policies have made a decisive commitment to production and have increased the resources available for the audiovisual sector: in the period 2021 to 2025 there is an increase of 344% in the titles we receive as mandatory deposit for preservation, with an annual and sustained increase of 45%. And this implies a series of invisible expenses that the excellent team of the Conservation and Restoration Centre is absorbing so that the heritage is not lost. But intelligent policies must be developed: if resources for new production increase, those for preservation must also increase proportionally. If they do not, it will be a short-sighted strategy. The sustainability of our audiovisual is at stake.

I'll return to it: there are Catalan directors who premiere on platforms without going through cinemas or receiving aid from the Generalitat, such as Society of the Snow, by Juan Antonio Bayona. Will these films also be preserved by the Filmoteca?

— We are the entity responsible for preserving all contemporary production based in Catalonia.

And what if they are from a platform that, like Netflix, is not based in Catalonia?

— We only have two entry points: through public subsidy from ICEC or by legal deposit. If it has legal deposit in Catalonia, it enters the collection. The rest are left out. Of course, we also interact directly with creators who trust the Filmoteca to take care of their legacy.

Let's talk about the Filmoteca Institute law. How and when will it be implemented?

— The law foresees its effective deployment once the Government approves the statutes, which are already drafted and are being evaluated by different legal bodies. We must be prudent with the dates, but we estimate it could be at the beginning of next year.

And what implications does the transformation into national equipment have in the budgetary field?

— The new budgetary definition translates into the creation of a series of jobs to ensure the operation of the new institute. Right now our human resources area depends on ICEC and, therefore, we will have to have an autonomous and decentralized human resources area. But the 2026 budget already includes the needs to begin the deployment. Finally, it will be a formality: to extract the proportional part of the Filmoteca's budget from within the current ICEC budget.

So no more resources will be allocated to the Filmoteca?

— As all the explanatory reports of the law make clear, the budgetary impact is by no means the main driver for the creation of the Filmoteca Institute. A perfectly sustainable transition in budgetary terms has been planned with a more than reasonable increase in personnel resources to guarantee the administrative effectiveness of the entity.

And from the outside, what will be different in this new phase? How will users notice it?

— In terms of experience, nothing will change for our users. What will change is that they will interact with equipment capable of facing future challenges with greater guarantees. And this will translate in the medium and long term into a higher degree of excellence in services and offerings.

Speaking of challenges, the Filmoteca has faced quite a few in the last 15 years: the move to El Raval, the consolidation of a new identity, the relationship with the neighborhood, the opening of the Terrassa Conservation Centre... These are challenges that an institution doesn't face every day, nor every decade. What are the challenges now, then, that require the redefinition of the entity?

— The effective, not just symbolic, consolidation of the Filmoteca as a pillar of the country's audiovisual sector. As we said before, we are clear that we must produce good Catalan cinema, and with resources. But we must also be clear that this production must be preserved, especially in this extremely violent context of technological changes and challenges. This is the Filmoteca's mission for the country: to ensure that contemporary cinematographic culture will reach our grandchildren in the same way that we can now enjoy the films of Segundo de Chomón. And it is no small challenge. Now the Generalitat has two tools to exercise its cinematographic competencies: ICEC, specialized in promoting production, and the Filmoteca Institute, which is the heritage and cultural soul that operates outside the pressures and logic of the market. With the new law, Catalan audiovisual is stronger and more resilient, more intelligent and capable of facing future challenges. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that any increase in resources allocated to production takes into account this heritage undergrowth that we care for at the Filmoteca.

The audience has been one of the great indicators for measuring the success of the Filmoteca in recent years, perhaps at the expense of other values. In any case, these are interesting figures: before the pandemic, the Filmoteca's audience ranged between 130,000 and 140,000 per year. Afterwards, it recovered to 120,000 viewers in 2024, but last year it fell to 108,000. Does that worry you? Are the pre-pandemic figures unrecoverable?

— First of all, I completely agree with the initial idea: spectator numbers have often been considered the sole element for evaluating an establishment's performance, and while they are a very important variable, they are not the only one. That said, the pandemic signified a paradigm shift in cultural uses, and specifically in the cinematic field. Mirroring ourselves in pre-pandemic public figures is a cruel and unfocused exercise. We operate in the present, where there has been a traumatic crisis in cinema attendance, and the debate must be placed within this framework. Secondly, we are not concerned about public figures. We are solidly established above the 100,000 spectator mark and have an average of over 85 spectators per session. And this year, which is proving magnificent, around 94 per session. These are figures that multiply commercial exhibition figures by 4. Nevertheless, we must take these figures with perspective. We are a public establishment and have a long-term strategy for building audiences. For me, it is much more important to see that our audience is getting younger and that we are generating spaces of interest in communities that previously turned their backs on the Filmoteca.

A few months ago, the Filmoteca joined the campaign End Complicity promoted by Film Workers for Palestine, which calls for an active boycott of “working with institutions involved in the genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people”. What actions or inactions has this commitment translated into?

— We joined the campaign because the issue of commitment in denouncing the genocide of the Palestinian people is a very live and pressing issue for the Filmoteca team. It seemed to us that it presented a feasible and coherent way to express our commitment. One of the intentions was to generate debate in our context and it was a cause for satisfaction to see that the Film Academy also joined, as did festivals like Docs Barcelona. It was our small contribution in a situation that, of course, exceeds what a cultural institution can do from Barcelona. It was also a decision we made to respond to very concrete dilemmas we faced in our programming, to questions we did not want to manage arbitrarily, but you will allow me to be discreet in this regard. In any case, we valued that it was necessary to make a public statement that clarified our criteria and position on this situation.

In relation to this positioning, this summer they have programmed The Mastermind, by Kelly Reichardt. It is distributed by Mubi, a company with ties to the Israeli arms industry and against which voices from directors such as Aki Kaurismaki and Radu Jude, as well as Film Workers for Palestine, have risen. How have they managed the decision to program it?

— We have managed it with full awareness of the contradiction. It is very important that you ask me this question and it is very important that I can answer it without hiding my head. Jim Jarmusch was asked this question in Venice, because his film is precisely produced by Mubi, and he said he was dismayed, but that if we scratch the corporate structures of the corporations that have financed all his films, we would always find dirt. And on this subject, I think we are venturing into one of the most disturbing, contradictory, and problematic territories of our raw material of work, cinema, and that is its industrial aspect. If we were to apply this criterion to films produced by Mubi, we would have to apply it consistently to all film companies, and we would open a can of worms. A24, for example, received hundreds of millions from Jared Kushner's fund, with direct ties to Israeli industries. And let's not talk about the merger between Paramount and Warner and its derivatives. The moment companies are involved in cinema, contradictions multiply. We do not approach this circumstance with cynicism. We do so with an awareness of what we can and cannot do. We joined the Film Workers for Palestine campaign because we studied it carefully and could apply it coherently. We do everything we can and everything within our reach, but even the mobile phone with which you record the interview or the one I have in my pocket is impregnated with the terrible contradiction of contemporary capitalism. Sometimes we cannot escape the contradiction, and this is a clear example.

By the way, how does the commitment to Film Workers for Palestine affect the collaboration with the Jewish Film Festival?

— Not only does it not affect the collaboration in any way, but communication with the team of the Jewish Film Festival has been and is one of the most interesting and sophisticated sources for defining the Filmoteca's position on this issue. The Jewish Film Festival is in no way a festival of the Israeli state and receives no aid from the Israeli state. In fact, it represents a very important space of opposition to Israeli state genocide and violence from the Jewish community, where the position it occupies is not only unique but also extremely valuable in the current violent context. And with their team, we have had honest and, in some cases, difficult conversations in the best sense of the word; that is, complex and far from Manichaean views. We have learned a lot from the Jewish Film Festival. And this year we will dedicate a focus to Simone Bitton, a fascinating Jewish filmmaker absolutely committed to denouncing Israeli state violence, with fascinating works that explore the cultural, political, and social links between Arab and Israeli communities.

The odyssey is generating a debate around how to project the film, whether in the version the director considers optimal, in IMAX 70 mm, or the one available in most theaters with the surface of the frame cropped by 25%. How should a film library position itself in these debates? Is it better to project it in a cropped version than not to project it at all?

— Resoundingly, yes. We must always strive for the greatest possible fidelity to the author's original intention and the material nature of the film; it is our obligation as a Film Archive. And if these conditions are not met, we must try to achieve the closest possible degree. But under no circumstances should we refrain from showing contemporary cinema. We are constantly faced with decisions that do not meet the highest standards of fidelity. Sometimes a copy is not available in photochemical form because its state of preservation does not guarantee optimal projection conditions, and we opt for a digital format. At the crossroads between absolute purity and the dissemination of film culture, we must always choose the latter. The Film Archive cannot afford dogmatic absolutisms; they are an aristocratic privilege.

To finish, if I had to tell the story of how a boy from Gandia dedicated his life to cinema and ended up as the director of the Filmoteca, what would be the first scene?

— A subject in the art history degree at the University of Valencia taught by Àurea Ortiz in which Chris Marker explained to us. It was an epiphany, a point of no return. And I learned that cinema could do things I hadn't even imagined it could do.