With a population of nearly 150,000 and lying just 80km from Barcelona, Tarragona is surprisingly easily to get to. The Reus Airport is just a 10-minute drive away, and you can reach El Prat in approximately 45 minutes by car, coach and train. This vibrant Catalonian seaside town boasts impressively preserved Roman ruins (basically, the whole place is an enormous open-air Unesco World Heritage site), a scrumptious film selection and – as you would expect – abundant local food of the highest standards. At prices as accessible as Tarragona itself.
The Festival was originally founded in 2001 as an “Audiovisual Creation Sample”, in other words: a showcase of world cinema to local audiences and passionate film lovers from the surrounding areas. Festival founder and director Xavier Garcia Puerto explains: “REC started as a small adventure between a group of students passionate about cinema and culture, and continued as an event focused on the multidisciplinary nature of audiovisual arts, consolidating itself as an essential event in the spring of the city and in Catalonia“.
In 2014, the Festival expanded to include development platform RECLab, and began attracting industry professionals from Spain, Europe and the world. This very comprehensive industry initiative helps film professionals on all stages of their production, from conception all the way to promotion and exhibition.
Click here in order to find out more about RECLab.
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Multiple strands
This year, REC Tarragona – which takes place for six days between December 3th and 8th) – includes 34 feature films in seven different sections.
Eight debut features comprise the Opera Prima section. They compete for the Festival top awards, given out by a jury also in attendance. Highlights include Anxos Fazáns’s Galician-language LGBT+ romance and tribute to rock The Dashed Lines, Mokhtaria Badaoui and Nabil Ben Yadir’s Brussels-set meta-theatrical tragicomedy about four Muslim grandmothers restaging Shakespeare The Baronesses, Samuel Abrahams’s mockumentary poking fun at British privilege Lady, Andrés Clariond’s satirical dram turning politics into pageantry Versalles, Chris Merola’s hilarious teen sex comedy Lemonade Blessing, and more.
The other six sections are: Fem Soroll!, Sessions Vermuth, REC Selection, Special Projections, Pantalla Tarraco and RecXic. Highlights include festival favourites such as Harry Lighton’s inventive queer tale of sex Pillion (starring a terrific Alexander Skarsgård), Richard Linklater’s tribute to Jean-Luc Godard and subversive filmmaking Nouvelle Vague, Park Chan-wook’s indulgent and playful revenge thriller No Other Choice, and much more.
Click here in order to view the full programme, and to purchase your tickets now.
And you can read our coverage of the event in the past three years by clicking here.
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All pictures on this article are property of REC Tarragona. You can see more images in the event’s gallery.
