Jesús Manuel Montané

At the start of his professional career, Jesús Manuel worked for various pioneering magazines and radio stations, divulging the culture of technology and videogames. Later he expanded into digital animation, and intrigued by this technology as a storytelling tool, he wrote and directed the short film 2.0 (1998), which was presented at the Malaga Spanish Film Festival. More films would come later, such as Godspeed: One - Secret Legacy (2008), an animated science fiction coming of age film which Jesús Manuel wrote and directed, and then Ushima Next (2011), a live action, futuristic, dystopian film, also using CGI effects. Ushima Next (2011) was co-directed with Joan Frank Charansonnet and features the dramatic actor and aspiring literary Nobel prize winner Fernando Arrabal. Ushima Next (2011) premiered in the "New Visions" category of the Sitges International Film Festival and was declared by Arrabal to be the official continuance of the "Panic" movement he had created in the sixties along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor. More recently, after three decades of intense work producing films and theatre and creating and developing music videos and publicity campaigns, Jesús Manuel moved to documentaries. He wrote, produced and directed Amal: The Soothing Voice Among the Ruins (2020), which narrates the challenging existence of Syrian puppeteer Walid Abo Rashed during the never ending war in his country. He also wrote, directed and produced the documentary Distance/La vida confinada (2021), which covers the painful effects of COVID on prison life and includes participation from the Department of Justice and the Catalan Institute of Health. Proceeds from this film will be going to the post-COVID neurological rehabilitation program at the Institut Guttmann.