Eye Candy are delighted to be bringing their giant outdoor broadcast screen to Spain to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the oldest and most prestigious film event in the history of the country – Valladolid International Film Festival.

SCREEN RUNNING TIME
8am – 12 midnight, 9 DAYS

PEDESTRIAN TRAFFIC FIGURES
Estimates: 20,000 per day X 9 Days = 180,000
Festival goers: 150,000
TOTAL = 330,000

There are very few festivals that have been around for 50 years and from 2005 Valladolid International Film Festival will belong to this select group and will be celebrating the occasion in style. Amongst the celebration there will be a special sidebar with the 50 most important features and 50 shorts screened in the history of the festival. To coincide with these celebrations, Eye Candy will be positioning a 20m² LED Broadcast Screen in Plaza Mayor which is the busiest and most central part of the city of Valladolid.

Since it began in 1956, the Valladolid International Film Festival has introduced some of the most prestigious directors and cinematography to Spain. Over the past 50 years, it has become Spain’s major showcase for new international films and receives extensive daily coverage in all the national and local press, giving the distributors the chance to use this impressive festival as a launching pad for nationwide distribution. Spanish audiences have become acquainted with names such as: Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, Andrzej Wajda, Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi and Yilmaz Gürney from the launch-pad offered by Valladolid.

The works of film-makers of the standing of Roberto Rossellini, Stanley Donen, Max Ophüls, Ken Loach, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Aardman Animations could be enjoyed and studied in the sections dedicated to their major works, many on view for the first time in Spain.

As one of Europe's oldest and certainly the most prestigious festival to be held in Spain, Valladolid has always been characterised by its willingness to take risks and to innovate in its programming. It has also been keen to critically examine each new school or movement as it has arisen, whether it be (for example) German, Polish, Chinese or Canadian. With a genuine concern for the art of cinema, for film-making and film-makers rather than the more obvious commercial or glamorous aspects of the industry, the festival has built up an identity of its own - equally attractive to enthusiasts, professionals and the media.

The 1950s and 60s were hard times in Spain thanks to the existence of a dictatorship with an iron control on all forms of expression, including the cinema. Valladolid, through various loopholes in the state censorship, was able to present films that otherwise would have been impossible to see in Spain.
An award or an enthusiastic reception from the audience and the critics meant, on numerous occasions, that the official state bodies gave the go-ahead to certain films which Franco's regime considered out of line with their ideology.

Much the same occurred with distribution on the arts circuit at the end of the 60s - a film could be placed more easily if it had previously done well at Valladolid (and indeed that continues to be the case today). Even after the death of Franco in 1975, Valladolid continued to be the "testing ground" for film which had been banned. For example the premiere in Spain of Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" at the 1975 festival is still recalled as a landmark.

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