Festival de Cans: Rethinking the Film Festival through Parody in Rural Galicia

This article focuses on the Festival de Cans, a picturesque film event that takes place in Cans, a rural hamlet in the heart of the West Galician province of Pontevedra. Through an ethnographic approach, this research seeks to understand how Cans’ peculiar rituals and the organization’s rhetoric uses parody as an aesthetic vehicle that allows us to reinterpret dominant meanings, allowing the conversion of the Galician rural landscape, its community, and settings into a location of cultural importance. Thus, it is interesting to observe how the festival articulates an exceptional setting where barns, workshops, basements, cellars and stables serve temporarily as film venues, altering the high-ranked film festivals cinephilic standards, excess and etiquette. Via the hybridization of classic film festival traditions with rural celebratory traditions Cans has consolidated its position both in the Spanish film festival circuit and the Galician film industry, becoming a must-attend event among Galician media professionals and personalities.