Albert Serra – In Conversation With China’s Bi Gan – and Carla Simón, Nicolás Méndez, Turbo Shorts Capture Spain’s Creative Take-Off at Shanghai
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- Spain has placed five films in the Cannes main competition over the past two years, more than any other country, with Thierry Frémaux citing a national "movement."
- Prime Video announced June 17 that Spain is its No. 1 non-English export force, with Spanish originals filling five of the top 10 non-English film slots globally during June 1–7.
- Albert Serra — whose English-language debut "Out of This World" stars Riley Keough and is being floated for a 2026 festival — will share the Shanghai stage on June 21 with Bi Gan, the 2025 Cannes Special Jury Prize winner for "Resurrection," in a conversation on storytelling across cultures.
- Five of the six Spanish Prime Original films in that top-10 chart are literary adaptations, including Mercedes Ron's Wattpad "My Fault" trilogy and Manel Loureiro's "Apocalypse Z," reinforcing Spanish Federation of Publishers secretary general Fernando Benzo's "safe IP: books" argument that novels ship with built-in audiences.
- Carla Simón's "Flamenco" (starring Rocío Molina), Nicolás Méndez's fashion-focused "La Tarara" (with Ingrid García Jonsson and Barbara Lennie), and animated short "La Llama" by Turbo (Pau López and Gerardo del Hierro, designed around Jaime Hayon's work with a score by Yerai Cortés) world-premiered at Cannes and screen in Shanghai.
- "La Llama" recreates more than a century of Spanish design and architecture — including Gaudí's Sagrada Família — with every object pictured made by Spanish designers, framing the shorts as a showcase of Spanish creativity across cinema, fashion, design, and music.
Why it matters: Spain is converting literary IP into a reliable streaming-export engine, with five of Prime Video's six Spanish top-10 titles already adapted novels — meaning publishers, not just filmmakers, are now a structural piece of Spain's non-English content strategy. The June 21 Shanghai session is also the first time Spain formally packages that momentum (Cannes rankings, Prime Video data, auteur conversations, short-film showcase) into a single China-facing campaign, raising the stakes for Spanish–Chinese co-production and adaptation deals downstream.
