180 international short films flood the Renoir

We live in a world dominated by immediacy, partly promoted by social media, and this causes the audiovisual content we consume to have less and less duration. Consequently, the world of cinema has also seen this trend gain more and more momentum and short films are making their way like never before. Now the Micro Festival lands in Barcelona, an exhibition for international short films that can be seen in the Renoir Floridablanca cinemas between April 13 and 15.

This event has been created by the cultural entrepreneur Marc Esquriol and has already passed through Madrid and Hondarribia, and now, a year later than planned due to covid, it arrives in Barcelona.

The festival features the participation of 180 short films of less than two minutes in length from 43 different countries, such as Taiwan, Finland, Chile, Iran, India, Croatia or the Dominican Republic. The cultural and cinematographic diversity that these films will present can be appreciated in three sessions of an hour and a half each and tickets are already on sale on the Renoir cinemas website. The festival is divided into seven different categories: experimental, animation, realities, dance, comedy, horror and love.

"The good, if brief, twice good," says the phrase by Baltasar Gracián, which the creator of this event, Marc Esquirol, now quotes when talking about the importance of synthesis and brevity. "Today we consume a lot of very short content on social media and we now want to explore this format in a more artistic and cinematographic way," comments Esquirol. The festival was held in Sala Equis in Madrid and in Hondarribia, with 800 and 400 spectators, respectively. The third stop was supposed to be Barcelona in April last year, but Covid has delayed the young entrepreneur's plans.

"It has been a path full of traps and complications, but we have finally won the game against the pandemic. We hope that the festival will be a complete success, despite the security measures due to the pandemic. In the near future we would also like to export this format to different cities in Europe and the world, we believe that it has been widely accepted and has a great future," comments Esquirol.

The pandemic has undoubtedly been one of the most complicated obstacles to overcome. While the Hondarribia edition could be held in summer, it has not been until after more than seven months that the festival has been able to reach its hometown. "We started preparing the festival more than a year ago and in recent months we have accelerated to make it a reality in Barcelona, but until we could ensure that it could be done with the current measures, we did not make it public," says the creator of the event.

Esquirol has promoted this festival through the platform Letto Studio, a cultural entrepreneurship studio that has already organized three editions of the Micro Festival, one edition of the U22 Festival at MACBA held in 2019, and several talks and meetings about cinema. "Cultural entrepreneurship is important and can be a determining factor in the emergence of young artists and new projects in this sector. I also believe that in Barcelona there are many talented young people eager to show the world what they are capable of doing," concludes Esquirol.