Set the Farm on Fire: Rethinking Rural Cinema in a Postnational Context
A Q&A with filmmaker Oliver Laxe and screenwriter Santiago Fillol, moderated by Sara Nadal-Melsió.

Organized in collaboration with el taller @ KJCC Summer Institute.

Oliver Laxe is a French-born Galician film director, screenwriter, and actor. Laxe grew up between France, Spain and Morocco. His first two films screened at the Cannes Film Festival: You All Are Captains (FIPRESCI Prize, 2010 Directors’ Fortnight) and Mimosas (Grand Prize, 2016 Critics’ week). His third feature Fire Will Come, was shot in Galicia, the land of his ancestors, and won the Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Laxe also played the leading role in Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraidand The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015).

Santiago Fillol is a Barcelona-based Argentinian filmmaker and screenwriter currently teaching in the cinema department at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Historias de la desaparición. El cine desde los fuera de campo de Franz Kafka, Jacques Tourneur y David Lynch (Shangrila, 2016). In 2009, with Lucas Vermal, he directed the documentary Ich Bin Enric Marco. As a screenwriter, he has collaborated with Nicolas Klotz, Ben Rivers, Isaki Lacuesta, and de Oliver Laxe. He will soon start shooting an adaption of Esteban Echevarría Matadero, set in the militant milieu of Argentina in the 1970s.

Sara Nadal-Melsió is a NYC-based Catalan writer, curator, and teacher. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and New York University and SOMA in Mexico City. Her essays have appeared academic journals in various edited volumes and museum catalogs. She is the co-author of Alrededor de/Around, and the editor of two special issues on cinema, The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism and The Militant Image: Temporal Disturbances of the Political Imagination. She has recently co-curated a show on Allora & Calzadilla for the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona and has written a book essay about it, as well as edited a companion volume on the Puerto Rican crisis.