The right words can hold a power beyond, well, words:
watch it: “Story of a Sign”
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Especially if they’re Spanish words. ;-)
That made me cry! Very touching.
Did you know that the guy who made this shortfilm (Alonso Alvarez Barreda) is a known plagiarist? He stole the idea from a Spanish shortfilm (if I can recall well) and later the said that the story just happened to be “identical”. They caught him on this on a known mexican morning news broadcast and when he had his panties all up in a bunch, he said that the “media” was all biased against him and that’s why mexican cinema can’t have any quality work. Of course, the guy now has zero credibility.
Do you have a link for this, Florsie?
Depending on what do you want: the identical spanish shortfilm or the news broadcast? The thing about the news broadcast is that it might be in spanish, but the shortfilm i’ll look into it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANWMZT0z_0k
Here’s the link to the spanish shortfilm. The first sign says “I’m blind, please give me a coin” and the other sign says “It’s a beautiful day, but I can’t see it”.
I’m sorry, but the existence of this other film doesn’t prove that the creator of this one plagiarized it. How can we know which was made first?
The spanish shortfilm participated in an internet shortfilm festival called Notodofilmfest in the year 2005. It didn’t win anything and it wasn’t a runner up either. Here’s the the URL of the webpage belonging to the film fest from where you can download the shortfilm: http://www.notodofilmfest.com/ediciones/05/cgi/php/ficha.php?clase=Concurso&idpieza=14
The so-called “Mexican version” competed in the 2008 cannes online festival. If you read closely on the credits, it says “Filmed on Tampico Tamaulipas 2007”. Now, I know that doesn’t mean he had the idea 2 years later. Still, I do believe that both films belong to the same circuit (being that the one of shorfilms online) and I do believe this guy might of got the idea from the spanish short. The spanish short is available on YouTube since 2006 and on the festival’s webpage since 2005. Since the spanish short wasn’t even a runner up or an actual winner, it sort of fell off the radar until the mexican guy won and someone saw the similarities.