Atletico Madrid president splits time between football and film

MADRID: Enrique Cerezo is best known in Spain as the longtime president of Atletico Madrid football club, the less glamorous cross-town rivals of Real Madrid.
But he is also a powerful film producer who owns the rights to some 7,000 movies, including around 70 percent of all flicks ever made in Spain, which feed his streaming platform FlixOle — the first to specialize in Spanish cinema.
Success in the two fields is measured differently, said Cerezo, who has led Atletico Madrid to six European titles and four Spanish ones since he took over as president of the Spanish first division side in 2003.
“You release a film on a Friday and on Monday you know whether it’s going to work or not, whereas in football you test yourself every week,” the silver-haired 75-year-old told AFP at the headquarters of his film business near Madrid.
His first experiences with film came during his high school years in Segovia, a town some 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Madrid, where he would help screen movies at the school’s cinema on weekends.
“Between studying and having the possibility of being able to manage this whole projection system, I preferred to be there,” Cerezo said.
When he finished high school, Cerezo began working on film shoots with the camera and lighting teams.
He took part in around 100 shoots in Spain, including with top directors such as Richard Lester — who directed the Beatles films “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” — and George Cukor — who won the best director Oscar for the 1964 movie “My Fair Lady.”
“The job of a producer has to start from the bottom, from being an assistant to an assistant to an assistant,” Cerezo said.
In the early 1980s, just as the market for video rentals was taking off, he founded a video distribution company, Video Movies International, which began buying film rights with the aim of restoring them and making them available on video.
It was a lot of work and cost a lot of money because the visual quality of films in “the early years of video was dreadful,” Cerezo said.
“The producers or the heirs of the producers didn’t want to do it, nor were they going to do it, so we had to do it ourselves,” he added.
At the end of the 1980s, Cerezo started producing films and buying practically all the major Spanish production companies, which allowed him to considerably increase his film library.
Among the films in his collection are light, unpretentious comedies made during the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which were scorned by critics but which Cerezo defends.
“Cinema, from my point of view, is for the general public, for people to have a good time, a nice time,” he said.
Cerezo joked that you have a better time in both cinema and football “when you win.”
His films are restored in a laboratory belonging to FlixOle and his distribution company Mercury Films, where they are digitised at a rate of one a week, if there are no major problems.
The lab recently completed the restoration of “Furrows,” a 1951 Spanish film classic about a poor family that migrates from rural Spain to Madrid in the hopes of finding a better life, which was very deteriorated.
The restored 4K resolution version of the film was presented on Monday at the San Sebastian film festival, the highest-profile movie event in the Spanish-speaking world.