Like This Video 0 7988

Added by animacam 29 May, 2017

Chelo Loureiro                             

PRODUCER AND MANAGER PRODUCER

Ferrol (Galicia, Spain)

Chelo Loureiro is specialized in the management of companies with activities related to Cultural Industries (Communication, Literature, Cinema, and Visual Arts). From years ago she works exclusively in the audiovisual sector.

She is a member of the Board of Directors of AGAPI (Galician Association of Independent Producers), Delegate in Galicia of CIMA (Association of Women Filmmakers), Member of the Academia de las Artes y de las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España and the Academia Galega do Audiovisual.

Her center of attention focuses mainly on the cinema of animation and in collaborations with new talents to make their debuts.

As Executive Producer has produced TV series, short films, documentaries and feature films, which won numerous awards and toured international festivals: http://www.abano.es/es/producciones.html

To produce De Profundis, by Miguelanxo Prado

Halloween 2016. Yesterday was October 31 and during night in Madrid, where I am at this moment, got full of zombies, witches, vampires and ghosts, as I imagine it happened around Spain. Wigs, masks, costumes… creative and macabre make ups walked through the streets resembling an advanced Carnival, thanks to this ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition that the Irish people introduced in USA and for a short time, but in a massive way, is celebrated in our country. Of course, encouraged by the commercial areas.

We are facing with another American “colonization”. One more case of an endless list of cultural or commercial products that the USA sell us through Hollywood. Because there isn´t anything like cinema to sell a country.

It is ironic that meanwhile we here submit the Spanish cinema to a harsh and unfair criticism, the Yankees introduce their industry through the 80% of our cinema and television screens, seducing us with its glamour. Or without him, because “The Night of Halloween” with which John Carpenter got to internationalize this celebration is a horror film of class B.

Thanks to this admirable film industry and to its skills in marketing issues, Hollywood sold us, from the jeans and the Marlboro of the Far West to Coca-Cola, from Donuts, or Hot dogs to Disneyworld. And they do it so well that our children are convinced that the USA is the origin of Halloween or even Snow White. As well, they were those able to convert us into film buffs. Even in the humble producers of cinema, as it is my case. Because that American cinema with which we grew up, taught us to dream. And also not to be afraid of trying to raise projects by impossible they seem.

For that reason, when Miguelanxo Prado and Nani García showed me the first sketches and chords of De Profundis, I didn´t have the minimum doubt that it was worth to try it. We knew adult audience don´t respond to animated films unless they were signed by Tim Burton. We knew that making animated films was slow and expensive, and to do it from a pictorial point of view with the texture, the chromatic work, and the personal stroke of Miguelanxo, was very complex. We knew that the maximum funding we could get would be, as much, twenty times less than the lowest budget of an American production. But we also knew that we had a beautiful story, a proposal of artistic search to put in relation painting, music and new technologies of the image. And any complex from all of us.

According to Miguelanxo, the only starting point was a declaration of intentions and Nani´s reckless enthusiasm, but I didn’t doubt about the talent of these two artists and the admiration and respect who they professed to each other, essential ingredients from my point of view to assemble a team who must work together during years. And guarantee of the final quality.

Working with them during four years, the trip to the premiere at the Palace of the Opera in A Coruña, with more than 100 musicians of the Symphonic Orchestra of Galicia live playing the soundtrack, 60 children of the Choir Cantabile and Xabier Ferreiro launching from an enormous table of sound, the foley, where seagulls, cetaceans, waves and storms were mixed and the clapperboard with images of the protagonists : the cellist who lived with her lover in the house located in the middle of the ocean, a painter of dreams… Sharing this experience with them, it was a privilege. To be able to show throughout the world a fantastic story that has Galician culture printed on every scene, from the fishing boat to the sailors’ strokes, from the house in the middle of the sea (inspired in a colonial house on the coast of Lugo) to the submerged city that discovers the protagonist at the bottom of the Sea (Sky for our sailors whose spirits are transformed into seagulls after drowning),  from conger eels hunter to the jellyfish shepherdess, or soprano Ainhoa Arteta singing with Carmen Rey a poem by Eva Veiga in Galician, a pride that is still thrilling me in each projection.

It was a learning from beginning to end. And even after finished, when we discovered that this story which was aimed at an adult audience (understanding that a film without dialogues, and with a piano rhythm, full of enigmas, wouldn´t awaken the interest of children) was requested by teachers and professors to be showed in many schools, to fascinating the youngest ones (who make an interpretation so different and beautiful of each sequence), which is a real incentive to go ahead.

In these moments in which producing cultural projects is a task almost impossible, I look to the cards and drawings we receive from these small viewers of De Profundis. For them we have the responsibility to resist.

Madrid, October, 2016.

Chelo Loureiro