The Asturian Fran Gayo has died in Buenos Aires this Thursday, where he lived, at 55, victim of cancer. Bonhomy strength, an enthusiasm expansion engine, Gayo’s legacy is intangible, and thousands and thousands of people who have seen over three decades have a film session scheduled by him in festivals, cultural centers and exhibitions, or who have read or have heard some song of MUS. Until the end, his wife, the great Argentine filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler have accompanied him (Open doors and windows, who won his son Olmo.
Gayo was born in Gijón in 1970. Bachelor of Spanish Literature, between 1997 and 2009 he was responsible for programming in the during the direction stage of José Luis Cienfuegos, years in which the Gijon contest caused an earthquake in the European film scene when it was able to house the best of the world’s independent cinema, thanks to the smell of its management team, and the sum of concerts and events to its program. In a rimbombante way, in the media we sold it as the European Sunday, and it was probably true, when Sundance still illuminated the path of a risky cinema, with intelligent and brilliant authorship.
Finished his first Asturian stage, in 2010 he moved to Buenos Aires to integrate into the BAFICI team (International Independent Film Festival of Buenos Aires) until 2017. There also scheduled the animated Bafici (between 2012 and 2014), the Expotoons animation festival (between 2010 and 2012) or the Spanish Spanish film show during five editions. In turn, he was part, since 2011, of the contents acquisition team of the platform of video on demand QUBIT.TV. Since 2012, and until his death, he was responsible for film content at the Niemeyer Center, in Aviles.
In 2019, he was part of the NFFF Programming team (International Fantastic Film Festival of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and, from 2021, of the GIFF (Geneva International Film Festival) as an advisor to Latin America and Spain. In addition, he cossed samples for the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Buenos Aires, the Filmoteca de Valencia (IVAC), the Transcinema Festival (Peru), the Cultural Center of Spain in Buenos Aires or the National Museum of Fine Arts of Argentina. For two years, in 2016 and 2017, in an adventure in which not even his permanent enthusiasm could with all the stones that were filled in his way, he was responsible for the artistic direction of the International Film Festival of Ourense (Ouff).
Return to Gijón
In 2020 and until last year, he returned to work at the Gijón Festival, now led by Alejandro Díaz Castaño, until in 2024, his forces diminished, he modeled several meetings and press wheels but left the work of programming to Tito Rodríguez. “The trade of programming,” he wrote, “to design a content proposal to be shown to a more or less specialized audience implies a series of commitments and a permanent reformulation of criteria. It also implies an efforted exercise that, in recent years, has been further extreme,” for the complicated cultural management in these last five years, something that he did rigorously, curiosity and passion.
In the nineties, he was part of another huge cultural movement of northern Spain, the Xixon Sound, by forming with Monica Vacas the Mus duo, which opted for intimate melodies and letters in Bable, unlike her generation partners, who did it predominantly in English. So if in the cinema I supported the indie, In music was inside the creative indie Spanish at the end of the century. Like Mus, after two EP as Zuma (1997) y Pigaz (1998), his first album arrived, Fai, All always based on homemade production, cows voice, gay keyboards and navigation between electronics and a folk of Anglo -Saxon descent. In both the US and in Asia several compilations were published with their work, while in Spain their other albums were edited: the EP Alma (2000), with which Mus settled in a folk Melancholic, and albums Divine Light (2004) y Life (2007), on an artistic journey in which his music was filled with light, without abandoning the Asturian in his lyrics. After finishing Mus’s adventure, he would still think of melodies: in 2009 he published the album The next harvests.
And in the tour of its artistic part, literary is still missing: Christmas wolves (2022), a book that wanted to be a terror story and ended alter ego unfortunate of the author. “When I wanted to realize, my grandmother, her ghost, was already in the book. And at that time, she began to transform into something else,” he told this newspaper in his publication. The novel was based on the reality, very hard, who earned a living with the cattle, with which they climbed into the interior mountains and in winter they went down to the brañas near the coast. “I have always obsessed me to imagine my family’s life before I appeared. And that includes the odyssey of those people who end up adapting to the cities of the sixties and seventy … without the classism being diluted. I believe that the class identity is born there. Not only because of the conviction that breasts at home, but for what you see of brutal economic differences […]. Now, in Argentina I see him again: from the circle that surrounds me his father was a worker. That places you in a separate place, and can never be forgotten. ”It was, in turn, a fight against the oblivion of the lived:“ With my moving to the center of the cities, with my transfer to Buenos Aires, I have dealsonalized. When I return to Xijón, and I approach my streets of childhood, there is nothing left. That is why I had to write, and capture that this was important and that it was not pretty. I don’t believe the sweet nostalgia exercises. ”
There is something to say of Fran: it was never cynical, he always sailed moved by enthusiasm, which infected and hit his interlocutor. The passionate of his approach to culture was born, yes, from great intuition and rigor, understanding that in the end there was a spectator. And therefore, next to him, he learned from cinema and life. From his in 2022 he reflected: “Music was the first. Things that in Spain would not have dared. ”
