Director Ventura Pons, A Key Figure In Catalan Cinema, Has Died Aged 78

With the death of Ventura Pons, who died today at the age of 78 in his home in Barcelona as a result of a domestic accident, a key figure in Catalan cinema disappears, a director who marked the turn of the century with the regular presence of his films at the Berlinale ( where he took part in the Panorama section for five years in a row) and who brought his ability to dialogue into his films, a skill that he had honed in his first artistic steps in the theater. Anita's director doesn't miss the train; Ocaña, retrat intermittent, Caricias and Amic/Amat received, among others, the Honorary Gaudí, the Gold Medal of Fine Arts and the National Film Prize of the Generalitat. In its farewell, the Catalan Film Academy emphasized: “One of the most important filmmakers in our country and who has done the most for Catalan cinema and in Catalan.”

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Bonaventura Pons i Sala was born in Barcelona in 1945. During the last five years of the Franco regime, he became known as a theater director before realizing with the documentary Ocaña, an intermittent portrait (1978), a look at the Barcelona of the time through José Pérez Ocaña, artist and activist for LGTBI rights. The diverse facets of Ocaña, the leading creator of the Barcelona counterculture as well as a fighter against social conventions and sexual repression when the police were still arresting homosexuals under the umbrella of the Social Dangerousness Law, served Pons as a mirror of her own sexual, intellectual and sexual repression cultural concerns. The documentary premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 1978.

In 1985, after the success of the satire The Priest of Olot, Pons founded his production company El Films de la Rambla, which allowed him artistic advancement while connecting and financially benefiting from the factions he most defended Catalan culture. in Catalan. This began a fruitful period in which he linked film after film in a kind of local Woody Allen (a similarity reinforced by the fact that his two titles, mostly urban comedies, were distributed by the same company, Lauren Films). In the case of Pons, he kept the rhythm by adapting the most exciting theatrical works of the moment by authors such as Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, Lluïssa Cunillé, Sergi Belbel or Josep Maria Miró, to which he knew how to give audiovisual stimuli. And in this leap also accompanied by several generations of spectacular actresses who stood out in the cinema with Pons after they had triumphed in the theater.

This resulted in 19 films, such as “The Why of Things” (1994), “Actresses” (1996), “Caresses” (1997), “Amic/Amat” (1998), “Dying (or Not)” (2000), “Anita Doesn't Lose the Train” (2000), where he surprisingly – and with great results – brought Rosa Maria Sardà together with José Coronado, Manjar de amor (2001) – his jump to an international film adaptation in English and the end of his series in Berlin –, Idiot Love (2004), Wounded Animals (2005), La vida abismal (2006) or Barcelona (a map) (2007), his fourth and final candidacy for the Goya. He was aware of and embraced the power of new technologies: for example, he was one of the first Spanish filmmakers to have his own website. “I did it to make it easier for people to get the things they want from my films. When we make a new film, we put up photos, a synopsis, press summaries… I update the homepage from home,” he recalled in 2003.

“I can’t complain because I’m one of the four or five directors with an international presence. In my life I have had 700 festivals, 32 retrospectives and not in small places. It is true that, against all odds, my cinema has traveled around the world in incredible ways. And it had greater international recognition than here,” he said in a 2014 interview with EL PAÍS. That same year, Pons led an initiative to reopen the old Lauren Gràcia cinema in his Barcelona neighborhood, similar to the Texas cinemas. The end of the lockdown also meant the permanent closure of the legendary venue.

Pons has also made a handful of interesting documentaries. To the already mentioned Ocaña, an intermittent portrait, he added El gran Gato (2002), which was completed by the drawing of another myth, the Rumbero Gato Pérez, who died in 1990 at the age of just 40, a musician who achieved an enormous response. received a tremendous response from Ángel Fernández – In his review of the film, Santos described him as a “rock singer filtered through the rhythms of salsa arrabalera”; or Cola, colita, colissa (2014), about the Catalan photographer who portrayed the misery of the shanties from the Gauche Divine. In Search of More, as in the documentary Ignasi M. (2013), it is about the story of Ignasi Millet, a renowned museologist who had to close his company and mortgage his house and his own belongings because of the economic crisis put at risk: “I believe that in life you have to fight for the things you believe in. The truth is that they tell me if I've gone crazy for making these films.” Pons' health was fragile after a stroke in 2013, and his last appearance in which he appeared weakened was a few ago days at Colita's funeral, although his death was due to a domestic accident.

In her penultimate feature film “Miss Dalí” (2017), she dealt intensively with the life of the surrealist character’s sister. With his astonishing clairvoyance, Jordi Costa portrayed the filmmaker in his review of this biography: “After 45 years of career, it is obvious that there are many possible filmmakers in Ventura Pons: the one who is reactivated here is the one who has already manifested himself. “ in the extraordinary Una merienda in Geneva (2013). That said, Pons could have been an excellent drama director for the BBC.”

Director Ventura Pons, a key figure in Catalan cinema, has died aged 78

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