Every festival is a means to an end. That medium that is the festival produces the event of gathering an audience in front of a film. The end which pursues is that unique event. Films may be screened once and a thousand times, but the event is unique.

The 17th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival will offer, between March 31st and April 9th of this year, 2017, a program made up of a hundred films: almost two hundred screenings arranged so that films talk and discuss with each other, with the audience as an interpreter and mediator.

Every festival has a cost, but presumably what is offered is priceless. That is, there is no equivalent that can replace it. Saying that it is priceless does not mean that it can be priced infinite or, on the contrary, none, that is, zero. It means that what a festival offers cannot be measured as the adding of the invested means, which of course have a price, and not exactly low.

What is offered is not, in short, a “product”, something equivalent to the addition of the means that have been set to get it done, neither to their uses nor to the profit obtained. What is offered is not there to be used, but experienced; like everything that deserves the category of event, in the most serious and radical sense of the word.

If preferred, that experience may as well be called ‘Art’.