Celia
Galan Julve

Celia Galan Julve was born in 1977 in Barcelona, where she still lives today. After studying Audiovisual Communication in Barcelona she applied to the Royal College of Art in London, where she took up a postgraduate La Caixa scholarship in animation from the British Council. She ended her scholarship successfully in 2002 with the film “Historia del Desierto”.

“Historia del Desierto” is the fictional story of Rosita Guzman (“La Mocha”), who broke out of prison in 1962 and disappeared into Mexico’s wastelands. Since then, she has made the highways of Mexico unsafe with her savage acts of violence. She is popularly called the “Jack the Ripper of Mexico” and was never apprehended again. Now, about forty years later, the short film tells the legend of this unscrupulous, thumbless, violent criminal from the perspectives of those who have faced “La Mocha”.

Whilst in London, Celia Galan Julve also produced the short film “Fused” (2001), which was based, like “Historia del Desierto”, upon stop-motion model animation. With her marvellous figure-animation, Celia Galan Julve has won several awards at international festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival, the IFP Los Angeles Film Festival and the Images Festival in Toronto.

In April 2004, Celia Galan Julve directed her first live-action short “One Minute Past Midnight”, funded by the UK Film Council and Film Four as part of the Cinema Extreme scheme, which won the Gold Hugo for Best Short Film at the Chicago Film Festival.

After completing residencies in Berlin and Paris (Festival de Cannes Cinéfondation) in 2005, Celia Galan Julve has been working on the screenplay of her first feature film entitled “Rosita Guzman is Alive”, which will be produced by Bertrand Faivre from The Bureau (UK/ France). In this semi-documentary film, she continues examining the legend of the violent and infamous Mexican criminal, Rosita Guzman, reopening the case of “La Mocha” from a different perspective.
The short film “The Summer of the Broken Appliances” was shot in her home town of Barcelona in August 2006.