José Luis Cienfuegos, Renowned Director of Spain’s Valladolid, Seville and Gijón Festivals, to Receive Posthumous Bellas Artes Golden Order of Merit

José Luis Cienfuegos, an indefatigable force for the modernization, international vision, new talent focus and industry and popular impact of three important Spanish film festivals, died from a stroke on Dec. 2. He was 61.

Two weeks later, Spain’s Council of Ministers announced that Cienfuegos will receive its Bellas Artes Golden Medal of Merit. The honor has been applauded by a huge sweep of politicians, cineastes, journalists and Spain’s industry across any divides. That’s how things should be. Cienfuegos’ death has left Spain’s industry with a sense of incredulity. Effusive, affable, hard-partying, Cienfuegos also worked as hard as hell for 30 years to share his passion for cinema beyond studio fare, first as director of the Gijón Film Festival (1995-2012), then the Seville European Film Festival (2013-2022) and finally the Valladolid Film Festival, from 2023. 

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Cienfuegos’ Gijón Revolution

It is hard to overstate the joyous impact of Cienfuegos when he took over in 1995 the film festival in Gijón, a post-industrial city nestling on the wave-lashed northern coast of Spain, backed by green hills, in Cienfuegos’ native Asturias. 

Dressed de riguer in black, down to his big-rimmed plastic glasses, he looked like an academic parachuted in from a post-punk academy. But he had nothing of a professor’s elitist distance nor traditionalism. 

In the early ‘90s, most Spanish film festivals drew much of their big plays from Europe’s grand auteurs. Passionate but accessible to even the humblest of festival goers, talking 19 to a dozen, Cienfuegos looked elsewhere –  U.S. indie cinema, then in its first and only full flush, and edgier European auteurist fare.

Greg Araki’s homage in 1996, Gijón’s second year under Cienfuegos, was, he said, “a declaration of intentions and new directions” for the Northern Spanish event. Within a few years, U.S. indie icons were fest regulars. Todd Haynes presented film shorts in 2000; Tom DiCillo inaugurated Gijón in 2001 with “Double Whammy.” Hal Hartley announced “The Girl From Monday” at Gijón in 2003. From Europe, Ulrich Seidl, Abbas Kiarostami, Bruno Dumont and Claire Denis received retros.

Cienfuegos also had a knack of picking up on young directors which went on to great things. From Argentina, he screened Lisandro Alonso’s debut “La Libertad” in 2001 and a decade later, Jonás Trueba’s first feature, “Every Love Song Is About Me” and a year later, Santiago Mitre’s “The Student.” 

Variety’s first interview with Ruben Östlund was not in Cannes nor his native Sweden but in Gijón where he presented and won for “Play” and announced “Tourist.”   

By the 1990s, however, Gijón’s young were leaving for Madrid or Barcelona. Cienfuegos wanted them back, or at least to see films in theaters. So the film festival he conceived tapped deep into and channelled the burgeoning local music scene, the Xijón Sound. 1999 was a case in point, with tributes to DiCillo and Aki Kaurismaki, a first Saturday concert with the Pretenders, followed by a rocking party at a local bar by with music from just formed Spanish rock group Sidonie.   

Gijón was his masterpiece, José Luis Cienfuegos unleashed. Under him, Variety wrote in 2007, “Gijon has become one — if not the — favored meet of sophisticated young Spanish film buffs.” Attendance quadrupled from 15,000 admissions in 1995 to 67,000 in 2006, 75,000 by 2010.  

It couldn’t last. Spanish film festivals depend heavily on local government funding for finance. In 2011, hard-right politician Fernando Álvarez Cascos was elected president of the Asturias Region. In January 2012, he summarily sacked Cienfuegos, prompting a letter signed by Pedro Almodóvar, Atom Egoyan, Isabel Coixet and Todd Solondz and 400 other filmmakers or writers, asking for him to he brought back. 

Cienfuegos at the Seville European Film Festival…. 

Other festivals, however, wanted him elsewhere. Javier Martín Domínguez, had resigned just a week before as artistic director of the Seville European Film Festival, protesting at budget cuts. Martín Dominguez had already built Seville up as a vibrant meeting point in November sun for European producers, distributors and institutions. 

Under Cienfuegos, Seville continued to stage the nominations announcement for the European Film Awards, converted Seville into the entry point for annual waves of European auteurs, while he battled to increase the festival’s impact on the city of Seville itself. 

And at Valladolid’s Seminci

That last point for Cienfuegos really mattered. It became a later-life crusade. When sacked at Gijón in 2012, Cienfuegos simply produced statistics underscoring its attendance surge under his mandate. At the time that he was appointed director in 2023 of the Valladolid Film Festival-Seminci, Spain’s traditionally second-biggest arthouse event, Spain’s box office languished post-pandemic at just 62% of 2019’s total annual gross. Young spectators were among the most likely to return to theaters. Cienfuegos’ new-fit reboot immediately honed in on movies from exciting new directors such as Laura Ferrés’ feature debut “The Permanent Picture,” Brit Molly Manning Walker’s Cannes Un Certain Regard victor “How to Have Sex” and U.S. indie doc icons Bill and Turner Ross with their first fiction outing, “Gasoline Alley.” 

He also installed Spain’s 3rd Independent Film Market (Merci), hosting distributor screenings which fairly hummed in 2025. By this year, he was concerned that Spanish films selected should include more uplifting commercial propositions, underscoring the crowd-pleasing potential of national movies. Yet, at one and the same time, focusing on first and second features, Meeting Point prize monies was near doubled to $45,000 for distributors of its winning films.

Admissions for 2025 ran at 103,000 up 30% on 2022, box office up 53%, with Meeting Point tripling its audience, and attendance of film industry professionals and journalists soaring 68%, reaching 2,180.

What makes Cienfuegos’ death so shocking is not just his relative youth but that he was not done yet. He and the Valladolid festival were still a work in progress. The old Gijón excitement was on once more.