The 34th Goya Awards ceremony, presented by the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences (AACCE), honored the best in Spanish and hispanophone films of 2019 and took place at the Palacio de Deportes José María Martín Carpena in Málaga, Spain on January 25, 2020.
The Goya Awards (Spanish: Premios Goya) are Spain’s main national annual film awards.
The awards were established in 1987, a year after the founding of the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, and the first awards ceremony took place on March 16, 1987 at the Teatro Lope de Vega, Madrid. The ceremony continues to take place annually around the end of January/start of February, and awards are given to films produced during the previous year.
The award itself is a small bronze bust of Francisco de Goya created by the sculptor José Luis Fernández, although the original sculpture for the first
edition of the Goyas was by Miguel Ortiz Berrocal.
PREMIOS GOYA 2020: BEST SPECIAL EFFECTS – MARIO CAMPOY AND IÑAKI MADARIAGA for ”The Platform” (El Hoyo)
”The Platform” (Spanish: El Hoyo) is a Spanish satirical science fiction film, directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia and released in 2019.
The film is set in a large tower-style prison where the inmates are fed by means of a platform that gradually descends the levels of the tower, ostensibly a fair system if each inmate takes only their fair share of food, but deeply inequitable in practice as inmates at the top levels have the
ability to take much more food and leave less for those below them.
The film’s cast includes Iván Massagué, Antonia San Juan, Zorion Eguileor, Emilio Buale Coka and Alexandra Masangkay.
The film premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness.
At TIFF, the film also secured a worldwide streaming deal with Netflix.
Critical response
Norman Wilner of Now correctly predicted that the film would win the People’s Choice Award, giving it a five-N rating and writing that the film
“has everything: low comedy, political allegory, left-field twists, crowd-pleasing surprises, spectacular violence, sadism, altruism and yet more
spectacular violence, all wrapped up in a high-concept horror movie that moves the premise of ”Cube” into a merciless vertical structure.
It’s grotesque and compelling, like grindhouse Buñuel. And it never blinks.”
Amy Nicholson of Variety wrote that “the film’s minimalist fury feels like the plays of Samuel Beckett. Massagué and Eguileor are up to being in a zesty “Waiting for Godot”. (Make that “Waiting for Gateau.”) And Eguileor’s nasty, delightful, occasionally tender performance feels like an audition to play a Bond villain, or perhaps the Spanish resurrection of Hannibal Lecter.”
