2016: Another busy year at LA Panda
LA Panda welcomes 2016 with great enthusiasm. Last year couldn’t have been more successful for our production company. We premiered Carlos Marques-Marcet’s 10,000 km in the US and it won the Spanish Film Academy Best New Director Award. We also released our first documentary, director Elia Urquiza’s Next, which won the Jury Award at Malaga […]
LA Panda welcomes 2016 with great enthusiasm. Last year couldn’t have been more successful for our production company. We premiered Carlos Marques-Marcet’s 10,000 km in the US and it won the Spanish Film Academy Best New Director Award. We also released our first documentary, director Elia Urquiza’s Next, which won the Jury Award at Malaga Spanish Film Festival and went through a dozen important festivals in France and Spain. We produced three feature films: People You May Know, Like Foam and Nobody’s Watching. We filmed the Mexican documentary Rush Hour and we organized the first editions of L.A. Ola and Rock&Doc in L.A., as well as countless other projects that guaranteed we kept investing in Spanish and Latin talent.
It seems that 2016 won’t fall short. The next twelve months will be once again full of action and it can certainly be a decisive year for the company, not only because of the workload but because of our consolidation in the international arena.
We start the year in style with the nomination of David Martin-Porras’ short film Inside the Box for Best Fiction Short at the Jose Maria Forqué and Spanish Film Academy (Goya) Awards. The ceremonies of awards and events will take place between January 11 and February 6, surrounded by an active campaign that we are launching right now. We’ll be waiting with our fingers crossed.
Roberto Pérez-Toledo’s crazy comedy Like Foam is almost finished and soon we’ll know in which festival we’re going to strip and release this film about an orgy with many feelings involved.
People You May Know, directed by JC Falcon, is currently in post-production. The drama filmed in Los Angeles, with a wonderful cast (including Spanish legendary actress Carmen Maura) is scheduled for release in spring festivals. From there we intend to release it in cinemas—we feel like Christmas elves working hard on the distribution strategy.
Julia Solomonoff’s Nobody’s Watching will be our first Latin co-production with Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and the US. The film will also start its path in festivals next spring and summer. This co-production with Isabel Coixet’s seal is a dramedy set between New York and Buenos Aires.
LA Panda will continue to bet on the success of Spanish cinema next year in Los Angeles with the second edition of L.A. Ola (this time in May) and Rockumentary (aka Rock & Docs), which will take place in September. L.A. Ola presents some of the best experimental Spanish films that have screened at the most prestigious festivals; the event had an audience of nearly 500 people last year. Rockumentary focuses more on music-themed documentaries combined with live music.
On top of these two events, we will work with ESCAC (the Catalan Film School) towards the first edition of ESCAC Talent Campus—organized along NALIP, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers.
LA Panda will produce Don’t Fuck Around with Love, the new film by Carlos Marques-Marcet, and also the drama A Texas Story by David Martin-Porras, based on the same screenplay that gave birth to the successful short film Inside the Box.
Besides these two feature films there are other projects under development of which we can’t say much yet: they fill the gaps of a 2016 with many things to do already. There are not enough hours in the day, but having eleven heads working in these projects certainly assures that they will be successful. Now let’s start working together.
