Ten years of rural cinema travel with Countryside FilmFest brings big screen stories to eight neighborhoods across Elx
From July 1 to 9, the Tenth edition of Countryside FilmFest in Camp d’Elx celebrates cinema on the move, bringing feature films and shorts to towns that have seen fading or absent cinema opportunities. The rural festival uses a total project spread across sixties-style venues in Ilicitanas districts, marking a first with a carbon-free footprint thanks to a photovoltaic generator and solar panels powering all screenings.
In Elche, the festival’s founder Alberto Gutierrez and organizer James Quiles describe this as a different kind of celebration. It focuses on towns where cinemas or summer venues have disappeared, offering a unique cinema that highlights rural life and environmental themes while aiming to be a sustainable event. The initiative has grown from Rural FilmFest’s first screenings in Ciudad Real and now counts on the support of the Elche City Council and the Institut Valencià de Cultura.
This year, La Foia, Valverde, Torrellano, La Marina, La Baia, L’Altet, Matola and Arenales del Sol will host nine nights of outdoor screenings. The program features sixty titles presenting a contemporary view of international film in both short and feature formats, exploring rural life, ecology, and natural and cultural resources.
All screenings are free, as are workshops and related events held during the festival. Weekday afternoons see film showings in urban venues, and a dedicated children’s section runs in social centers of Valverde and Torrellano, starting at 10 pm. The aim is to offer an hour and a half of rural cinema in a new neighborhood each night. Quiles notes that the project invites city audiences to explore county towns just as residents from small towns once traveled to the city for cinema.
The lineup includes 19 documentaries, 28 animation pieces and 13 fiction works, representing 28 countries. Among them, 56 short films accompany feature-length titles while two mid-length works complete the slate. The festival seeks films that address rural life broadly, from ecological messages to stories set in rural environments across fiction, animation, and documentary forms.
Festival organizers also host guests whose works travel between local and international contexts. This edition features Lebanese filmmaker Samir Kawas with Hurldescribing the challenges of a city in Lebanon where a mountain of trash spills into the streets; Andrzej Cichocki with A Little Heaven, a story about a family in a rural setting; Catalin Egely with an animated piece From the Ground; Kirsikka Paakkanen from Finland speaking about returning to a childhood village in When Mill Hill Trees Talk to Me; and French filmmaker Charles Habib Drouot presenting a comedy set in the French mountains. World premieres include Quixote by Spain’s Paul Lozano and other international debuts, along with several European premieres in the mix.
Additionally, the Rural Community section spotlights films from the Valencian Community, featuring works by Adam Aliaga from San Vicente del Raspeig, Guille Porcar, Raul Lorite from Valencia and Ilicitana Ines Campello, who explores animation with a playful touch about enduring love. The festival’s jury comprises cinema and culture figures, with past winners invited to judge this edition’s prizes. A lively intergenerational competition, Movilmetratges, invites anyone to record an audiovisual piece with a mobile device and submit it by early July. A jury made up of the participants’ grandparents will determine the winner on July 5 during the exhibition period.