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screened, but so will less mainstream films such as Gente en sitios by Juan Cavestany (last year’s best film according to El Cultural’s critics) and Jordi Cadena’s La por.‘It’s an honour for me’, Cadena states. ‘If you look at the selection of films, you realise that it includes the best of the year, the most prizewinning films... Mine is the smallest and went more unnoticed, but I think people might like it because it portrays a universal problem’. The director of La por will be one of the more than 50 guests at Nantes. Prominent names among the rest are Álex de la Iglesia, Fernando Franco, David Trueba and Javier Cámera, who will be feted in a tribute and retrospective of his career. Other guests such as Cadenas and Mar Coll, Raquel Osborne, Helena Taberna, Almudena Armenta and Isabel de Ocampo are attending the festival with the support of Acción Cultural Española’s PICE Programme (for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture).‘The presence of directors is one of the major attractions for audiences’, states Pilar Martínez-Vasseur, creator and director of the festival. ‘They’ve always supported us because we treat them with respect and seek to make the whole of Spanish cinema known’. The festival was started 24 years ago at the department of Contemporary History of the University of Nantes. Pilar, who comes from Aragón and is head of the department, realised that in France people were incapable of grasping the complexity of contemporary Spain through the media and set herself the goal of conveying it through films.‘Films are our country’s best distinguishing feature and hallmark, even though the official institutions don’t see it this way’, Martínez-Vasseur comments. ‘Here people don’t come to improve their knowledge of Spanish or anything like that. Nantes is a northern city that hasn’t got close ties with Spain. There’s no consulate or Instituto Cervantes. They come here for the exquisite cultural product, Spanish cinema, and because they’re alreadyArticle185Selection of projects