Oliver Laxe, film director and alumnus from the bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Communication at UPF, is the first to win an official award at Cannes. The film O que arde, directed and scriptwritten by Laxe, was released worldwide on 21 May during the Festival, and won the Jury Award in the Un Certain Regard section for which 18 films were competing. Santiago Fillol, a professor with the Department of Communication at UPF, participated in the film as co-scriptwriter.

Only three directors from the Spanish state have been selected in the Festival’s 72^nd edition: Oliver Laxe with O que arde, Pedro Almodóvar with Dolor o Gloria, and Albert Serra, with Liberté. 

The film was developed in the master’s degree in Creative Documentary of the BSM-Pompeu Fabra University. As often occurs with other films of the master’s degree, during the preparation and shooting of O que arde, Oliver Laxe enjoyed the collaboration of a further nine students of the master’s degree, with whom the director shared various stages of the creative process.

The film was shot in Galicia and reflects in depth on forest fires, the unrest created by the presence of arsonists and the cycle of nature. The film depicts the four seasons in a Galician village, Os Ancares, in which two parallel stories are told. On the one hand about a neighbour who returns to the village after leaving prison -accused of starting a devastating fire- and on the other, the story of two novice firefighters.

Laxe debuted with his first feature film in 2010, the documentary Todos vós sodes capitáns, which won him the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.  In 2016, he won the Critics’ Week Award, also at Cannes, for his film Mimosas.