Luis López Carrasco | 2020 | Spain | 200’ | digital

Shot entirely on Hi-8 videotape in a bar in Cartagena, The Year of Discovery is a monumental work which excavates the legacy of 1992, proposing a counter-narrative to the official history of the year that Spain hosted the Olympics in Barcelona, the universal exposition Expo’92 in Sevilla, and celebrated the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the America. This landmark year is considered by many to be the moment when Spain officially entered into a modern neoliberal age, when the country consolidated a new international image as a democracy and moved away from a past associated with underdevelopment, Franco’s regime and stereotypical folklore. In Carrasco’s home region of Murcia, the new economic policies of the early 1990s were met with riots that razed the parliament building in Cartagena, a forgotten episode of national and local history which locals recall in the film. The Year of Discovery was hailed as one of the most important film works of 2020 and finally gets its first London cinema screening at the festival.

In collaboration with the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, where The Year of Discovery screened online in 2020

In partnership with the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK and the Instituto Cervantes London

Followed by a conversation with Raúl Liarte, co-writer of The Year of Discovery