On Monday morning the representatives of the main political parties will meet in Gijón on the extraordinary council of the municipal company that manages the city's Film Festival (Divertia) to ask for explanations for a report published in the magazine

Jot Down

.

According to Jesús Martínez Salvador, municipal spokesperson for Foro, in this article "the director of the International Festival of Xixón (FICX), Alejandro Díaz Castaño, is ridiculed and the figure of the company's manager, Lara Martínez, is praised. Obviously, he would not have nothing to say if it weren't because in this case it is an order from Divertia, for which

3,630 euros of money from all the people of Gijón have been paid

to

Jot Down

magazine

".

Bárbara Ayuso, author of the report entitled

Los someone y los nadies of the Xixón International Film Festival

that was published on December 30, 2020 and can be read on the media's website, assures that "at no time did

anyone tell me that this had to be an infomercial

, but it was about having "absolute transparency" how the festival is set up during the 15 days prior to the opening. They asked me to do journalism, and that's what I did. "

Alberto Arce, the Festival's Chief of Communication during this edition (event organized by the Gijón City Council, governed by the PSOE), declares that "all the media receive publicity from the festival, and in parallel the journalist is invited to cover the festival to Let him write what he deems appropriate. In Spain there is a legal margin that allows exercising the right to honor, rectification and even the withdrawal of the article, in the event that something is said that is not true. The problem is that it was not liked In my opinion, the article reflects exactly what happened during those two weeks. "

Indeed, it is surprising that in the report, Arce is the one who criticizes the festival the most,

something unusual for a press officer

, albeit occasional.

Mar de Marchis, director of

Jot Down Magazine

, explains that she received "a proposal for an advertising agreement from Arce of 3,000 euros + VAT, which expressly asked Bárbara Ayuso to do the coverage. I did not read it before it was published because I was three weeks of vacation due to medical prescription and I understood that the client, that is to say, the Gijón Festival, had approved it. On my return, I read it and realized that

it was not exactly what I had agreed on

. So I called Arce, and the first thing she did was congratulate me on the report. But I felt manipulated by an issue that, in my opinion, is political. I told her that, once I had paid the journalist, I would return the rest of the amount. "

Lara Martínez prefers not to speak until Monday's meeting, but the Forum's spokesperson affirms that "the report published in

Jot Down

is the only result of the festival's investment in the magazine. The problem is that it does not do justice to the excellence of the work carried out by the entire festival team, who carried out extraordinary work not without creativity and care, despite the changing health situation we are facing. That

seems unacceptable

when it comes to the product of the economic agreement between the FICX and the magazine, supervised by the Head of Communication. A commercial space is meaningless if it is detrimental to the interests it represents, and even more so if it is paid for with public money. "

The versions of the events differ.

From a distance, the "organizational chaos" of this "

regional

House of Cards

", as Ayuso describes it after recalling past controversies, is understandable when it was just announced, three weeks after the inauguration, the change to

online

of an edition that wanted to be present until the last moment, simply because a movie at home is not the same as on the big screen.

Despite everything, it was possible to save practically the entirety of a program acclaimed for its excellence, which on this occasion reached beyond the confines of the city.

The 58th edition of the Gijón Festival was a success, at least that is something that everyone agrees on.

Less is nothing.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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