User:Blaster Bates/Catalan Institute of Cinema

The Catalan Institute of Cinema (ICC) is a limited company founded in Barcelona in 1975 by a group of Catalan cinema professionals and industrialists, with the aim of promoting Catalan cinema and the Catalan film industry and "with the desire to include all the people from the Cataln-speaking countries involved in the film industry", according to Josep Maria Forn i Costa,  one of its founders and its president during various periods (1976-1978 and 1980-1986). Its head office is in Barcelona.

Foundation and founders
Although it was not fully launched until two years later, in 1975 seventy professionals from the world of cinema set up the Catalan Institute of Cinema (ICC). Among its founders were numerous actors, technicians, directors and film producers, who did not officially announce the new entity until February 1976, after completing all the official procedures. The ICC's first board of directors was chaired by the film director Josep Maria Forn i Costa, with Carles Duran i Tegido, also a film director, as secretary, and Jordi Tusell Coll, a producer, as treasurer. As members there were three directors, three technicians, three actors and three writers and cinematographic scholars. The task of the first board of directors was to determine a plan of action in order to achieve the proposed objectives. In addition to the people already mentioned, there were the filmmaker Jaime Camino, the media historian Romà Gubern, and the film critic and disseminator Miquel Porter i Moix, among other professionals. A total of 647 film professionals and a hundred companies from the audiovisual sector were members.

Aims
Among the aims of the founders of the ICC at its inception was to promote Catalan cinema as a vehicle for the culture of a people, promote cinema in the Catalan Countries, develop the film industry there and create a cinema that was part of the democratic struggle, both in terms of its content and its production.

Production
From the beginning, the ICC's main activity was the production of short films. These films, which are of considerable documentary and historical value, have become part of the Catalan heritage. Among this series of short films are the Noticiari de Barcelona (Barcelona News), a commission from the Barcelona City Council, which produced about sixty short films between 1975 and 1980, Imatges i fets dels catalans (Images and facts of the Catalans) for the Popular Culture Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Notícia de Catalunya for the Catalan Government and the Barcelona City Council and more than a hundred other titles, all for public sector institutions, including Som i serem, Història de la Generalitat de Catalunya. It has also carried out studies, mainly economic ones, of the film sector. Its productions include television programmes such as Vida privada, based on the novel of the same name by Josep Maria de Sagarra, published in 1932; a television series about Barcelona and Barcelona society in the 1920s, in four chapters, produced by the Catalan Institut of Cinema TVE in co-production with the RAI; Un dia volvere, based on the novel by Juan Marse, directed by Francesc Betriu. It has also collaborated with TV channels such as TV3 and France 2. Among the films it has produced are La ciutat dels prodigis, based on the novel by Eduardo Mendoza and directed by Mario Camus, La Princesa del Polígon, directed by Rafa Montesinos, and popular European series such as Caravaggio, Elles et moi, I Viceré, Enric IV and also for German, Italian, French, Belgian, Swiss and other channels. It organised Converses de cinema and also drafted a law to create the Autonomous Cinema Institute.

Awards
In 1978, at the 22nd Sant Jordi Cinematography Awards, it was awarded the Special Jury Prize for all its activities and especially for its informative work. It has also received an award in Berlin, where tribute was paid to its activity at the Noticiari de Barcelona.

Catalan Institute of Cinema Private Foundation
In 1991, the Catalan Institute of Cinema Private Foundation was created to conserve and market images, and also to catalogue series and short films, reports and documentaries. The Foundation has also published several collections of books on economic studies on Catalan filmmaking and on the historiography of Catalan cinema or cinema in Catalonia. Among others it was founded by Joan Antoni González i Serret, who was its president, Jordi Feliu Nicolau, Miquel Porter Moix, Lluisa Passola Vidal, P.T. Films S.A., Figuard Films S.A., Film Tel S.A., Zoom Televisión S.A., Alberto Duffo Puente, Francesc Espresate Xirau, Josep LLuis Galvariato Tintoré, Romà Gubern Garriga-Nogués, Gibert López-Atalaya Mañosa. Today the foundation, despite the company's closure in 2009, continues its conservation and distribution activities.