Adrià Guxens, awarded in ‘Looking China’.
Adrià Guxens, one of the four ESCAC graduates who participated in the last edition of the Looking for China Youth Film Project, has won the second award of the Golden Lenses Awards for his short film I don’t think it is going to rain. As part of the award the graduate will return in April 2020 to China to participate in the Looking China 2020 program and shoot a documentary in Chongqing.
«It only took a couple of days for the protagonists of my short film, Ling Xiaobai and his grandmother Xiuzhen, to become my host family, as they not only shared their home, food and knowledge with me, but also gave me a great story about the generational clash between the old and the new China.»
The short films made by the other three graduates, I’m too busy by Carmen Aumedes, Pull it, Sharpen it by Marta Schmidt and the film by Jaime Puertas, are currently in the selection phase at different festivals.
The eighth edition of the exchange program hosted over 400 film students from around the world, who traveled to China to experience local life, culture and make several short films on this year’s theme; Moments, Seasons, Times.
«When your main film references are Asian and when you’re such a geek that you’ve even shot more projects in Chinese than in Catalan (in Catalonia!), being told that you’re going to shoot a documentary in the land of Jia Zhang-ke and Wong Kar-wai is something like a dream.
Looking China proved as soon as I arrived in Shanghai how wrong I was about Chinese culture, because despite believing I knew many of its attributes, the culture shock was so great that every day was surprising and unpredictable.» Adrià Guxens.
Adrià Guxens, Carmen Aumedes, Marta Schmidt and Jaime Puertas are the four ESCAC graduates who traveled to China in the 2019 edition. In the previous one they were Judith Carceller, Daniel Olmos, Bernat de Ferrer and Angels Melange and here they tell us about their experience.
Looking China is a cultural exchange program for film students organized by the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture at Beijing Normal University, culminating in the Golden Lenses Awards.
