New York Times

In Transit – A Guide to Intelligent Travel
September 7, 2011, 6:00 am

Experimental Film the Focus at Madrid Festival
By VALERIE GLADSTONE

Experimental video art takes the spotlight at Optica, a festival featuring works produced by filmmakers from around the world. From Sept. 16 to 18, fans and filmmakers alike will gather to screen recent films at La Casa Encendida arts center (2 Ronda Valencia), and other Madrid galleries.

Film fans will also be able to attend lectures, performances and Q&A’s with the artists. Among the festival highlights are screenings of Melanie Menard’s “Ghost House,” which she filmed in several abandoned houses in Ireland, and Micheline Durocher’s surrealistic “Lapse,” a video piece about a swimmer in a bubble of water.

Since its inception seven years ago in Gijón, Optica has become a popular event in other European and South American cities and plans to extend its reach to New York and Los Angeles in 2012.

To prove its inclusiveness, the directors, Patricia Peláez Álvarez and José Ramón González Saiz, have produced an Optica Kit, available by mail, for beginning filmmakers to try their hands at creating their own video art at home.

“We want to encourage encounters with visual experimentation at an international level,” Ms. Peláez Álvarez said. “We seek to provoke reactions in the spectator’s personal world view. Experiment means to go in search of the unknown. We want people to discover how they create their memories.”