With the participation of Paula Giménez Monar (author) and Lucía Boned (editor).
On 31 December 2015, the Valdeska bookstore in Valencia closed its doors after 40 years of activity. It began, developed, and ended without compromise. On its business card, it described itself as a “non-bookstore,” and Sergio, its owner, as the quietest bookseller in the city. During a visit to the Stockholm library, Sergio felt overwhelmed by any accumulation. So many books, so many authors, drained his energy. He decided to stay among books, but without selling them. Me voy. Me voy is not the story of a bookstore closing, nor the portrait of an extraordinary bookseller; it is a desire to fix things in filmed images, to make something enduring by showing the moment of its disappearance.
Paula Giménez Monar’s cinema is a cinema of searching. It is from this idea—the constant exploration of the different expressive possibilities of images and sounds—that we can understand the heterogeneity of her filmography. Working within the porous boundaries of non-fiction, she challenges the traditional notion that authorship is defined by the consistency of a style and the repetition, across a filmography, of the same themes and forms. It is precisely this heterogeneity, this stylistic variety, that constitutes the fundamental characteristic—authorship, ultimately—of an explorer-filmmaker whose works, many of which take the form of a work in progress, convey a firm commitment to keep searching, to never settle. As Manny Farber would say, “termite-movie” cinema that moves forward, “always devouring its own confines.”
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