Festival de Cans

Historia

The Cans Festival is an annual short film festival held in the parish of Cans that coincides with the near-homophonous Cannes Film Festival. The festival is organized by the Arela Cultural Association and coordinated by the scriptwriter Alfonso Pato.The festival takes over the whole village; Barns and basements change their normal uses to become cinema screens and the audience are ferried by locals to and from the screenings on two-wheel tractors, known locally as chimpíns. Other free activities are also available to the public: concerts, parades and hiking routes.BackgroundThe Cans Festival is celebrated every year in the parish of Cans, which has an official population of 400 inhabitants although during the festival that number rises to more than 10,000 people. Its symbols of identity are the peculiar cinema rooms: sheds, basements, empty houses, wine cellars and even henhouses transferred altruistically by their owners who devote themselves to the festival and collaborate in everything they can.Short film is the genre par excellence in Cans, and every year the festival official section shows the best Galician productions of the season. But Cans is something else than a short film festival: it has documentaries and full length films premiers, a video clip contest, talks with prestigious filmmakers, presentations of experimental productions like web series, training programs for AV students, etc.HistoryCans Festival was born in 2004, as a kind of joke. The phonetic similarity between Cans (which also means dogs in Galician language) and Cannes was in the mind of some visionaries from a long time ago. In that year they decided to join forces and ideas and set in motion an event that would coincide in time with the glamorous Cote d'azur festival: Cannes. But that was a long time ago and from this funny word game a serious film festival emerged.