The Animalist Party PACMA of Guipuzkoa has asked the San Sebastian Film Festival to withdraw the screening of the documentary on bullfighting Lonely afternoonsscheduled for September 23. Albert Serra’s film focuses on the experiences of bullfighters Andrés Roca Rey and Pablo Aguado, who, for their political training, “humanize a violent practice.”
“It’s a film that will obviously generate a lot of talk, and there will be people against it and people for it,” the director of the Festival, José Luis Rebordinos, told elDiario.es, who believes that what the filmmaker has achieved in his film is to “approach this world with an artist’s eye.”
“This is not a film to say yes, yes or against. There is a cultural phenomenon where there is brutal violence against bulls, it is true, no one can deny it. I think that even the bullfighters themselves do not deny it,” he adds, “well, there is a growing movement in society that believes that this is animal abuse and that it should not be allowed.” Precisely at the beginning of September, the Ministry of Culture awarded the National Bullfighting Award with citizen support of more than 90%. A decision that the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, had already put forward last May.
“Although Albert Serra has indicated that his approach is primarily aesthetic, at PACMA we consider that these types of representations raise serious ethical concerns,” explained the animal rights party’s board member Asier Esparza in a statement. “By proposing a romantic and intimate vision of a controversial practice such as bullfighting, we risk normalizing and perpetuating a tradition that involves violence against animals, which goes against the ethical values that we must defend,” he added.
Driving home “animal violence disguised as culture”
The Animalist Party stressed that the festival receives “considerable financial support” from public funds managed by institutions such as the Donostia City Council, the Basque Government and the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, and that, therefore, citizens “have the legitimate right to demand that these public resources are not used to give visibility to violent content.
They also point out that, given that it is an event of international prestige that projects a “cultural image of Spain in the world”; “Allowing the dissemination of a work that attempts to humanize bullfighting implies that we Spaniards, in general, agree with it, when the current reality is very different.” “We believe that as a cultural reference, the festival must align itself with the values of today’s society where violence against animals disguised as culture is increasingly cornered,” he concluded.
