page_title: Andalusia
section_title: Film
hierarchical_section_title: Andalusia / Art and culture / Film
caption_attribution_description: Español: El actor Alberto San Juan, protagonista de la película La Verguenza, el día de la inauguración en el Teatro Cervantes del Festival de Cine Español de Málaga.
context_page_description: Andalusia region is the southern autonomous community in Peninsular Spain. It is the most populous, and the second largest autonomous community in the country. The Andalusian autonomous community is officially recognised as a "historical nationality". The territory is divided into eight provinces: Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga and Seville. Its capital is the city of Seville. The seat of the High Court of Justice of Andalusia is located in the city of Granada.
  Andalusia is located in the south of the Iberian peninsula, in southwestern Europe, immediately south of the autonomous communities of Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha; west of the autonomous community of Murcia and the Mediterranean Sea; east of Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean; and north of the Mediterranean Sea and the Strait of Gibraltar. Andalusia is the only European region with both Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines. The small British overseas territory of Gibraltar shares a three-quarter-mile land border with the Andalusian portion of the province of Cádiz at the eastern end of the Strait of Gibraltar.
context_section_description: The portrayal of Andalusia in film is often reduced to archetypes: flamenco, bullfighting, Catholic pageantry, brigands, the property-rich and cash-poor señorito andaluz and emigrants. These images particularly predominated from the 1920s through the 1960s, and helped to consolidate a cliched image of the region. In a very different vein, the province of Almería was the filming location for many Westerns, especially (but by no means exclusively) the Italian-directed Spaghetti Westerns. During the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, this was the extent of the film industry in Andalusia.
  Nonetheless, Andalusian film has roots as far back as José Val del Omar in the pre-Franco years, and since the Spanish transition to democracy has brought forth numerous nationally and internationally respected directors: Antonio Cuadri (Heart of the Earth), Chus Gutiérrez (Poniente), Chiqui Carabante (Carlos Against the World), Alberto Rodríguez (7 Virgins), Benito Zambrano (Solas), and Antonio Banderas (Summer Rain).
  Counting together feature films, documentaries, television programs, music videos etc., Andalusia has boomed from 37 projects shooting in 1999 to 1,054 in 2007, with the figure for 2007 including 19 feature films. Although feature films are the most prestigious, commercials and television are currently more economically important to the region.
  The Filmoteca de Andalucía, headquartered in Córdoba, is a government-run entity in charge of the investigation, collection and diffusion of Andalusian cinematic heritage. Other important contributors to this last activity are such annual film festivals as the Málaga Film Festival (Festival de Málaga Cine Español (FMCE)), the most important festival dedicated exclusively to cinema made in Spain, the Seville Festival of European Film (SFCE), the International Festival of Short Films—Almería in Short, the Huelva Festival of Latin American Film, the Atlantic Film Show in Cádiz, the Islantilla Festival of Film and Television and the African Film Festival of Tarifa.
caption: Málaga Film Festival
exif: {}