A CETT-UB lecturer writes the first Barcelona tourist guide based on scenes filmed in the city
Films so popular as Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), by Woody Allen, or All About My Mother (1999), by Pedro Almodóvar, helped to include Barcelona on the international cinema filming map. This is the premise that Eugeni Osácar, lecturer at the University School of Hotel Management and Tourism (CETT-UB), used to write Barcelona, una ciutat de pel·lícula, co-edited by Diëresis and Barcelona City Council. The work offers different views of Barcelona through some movies filmed in the city. It is a historical, geographical and particularly tourist trip from 1920s to nowadays. It combines historical and scientific rigour with an informative and engaging style; readers will be able to visit and feel Barcelonaʼs spots and landscapes through Catalan, Spanish and international cinema.
Films so popular as Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), by Woody Allen, or All About My Mother (1999), by Pedro Almodóvar, helped to include Barcelona on the international cinema filming map. This is the premise that Eugeni Osácar, lecturer at the University School of Hotel Management and Tourism (CETT-UB), used to write Barcelona, una ciutat de pel·lícula, co-edited by Diëresis and Barcelona City Council. The work offers different views of Barcelona through some movies filmed in the city. It is a historical, geographical and particularly tourist trip from 1920s to nowadays. It combines historical and scientific rigour with an informative and engaging style; readers will be able to visit and feel Barcelonaʼs spots and landscapes through Catalan, Spanish and international cinema.
The guide includes twenty routes to visit the city as if we were watching the movies recorded in it. Among many others, Barcelona has been the scene for the recent Haywire (2011), a thriller filmed by Steven Soderbergh in different Ciutat Vella's spots, or Biutiful (2010), starred by Javier Bardem and directed by the Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu.
It also collects some classics such as Professione: reporter (1975), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starred by Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider; The Tulse Luper Suitcases, by Peter Greenaway, or the French tragicomedy L'Auberge espagnole (2002), by Cédric Klapisch; as well as other Catalan successful films as Els nens salvatges (2012), by Patricia Ferreira, or the two first parts of [REC], by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.
Besides the texts describing each film, the book is illustrated with more than one hundred stills, images of shootings and historical photographs which show actors and directors in Barcelona. It also include QR codes to access some interactive maps.
The Spanish edition of the guide, Barcelona, una ciudad de película, co-edited by Diëresis and Barcelona City Council too, is written in a slightly different way as it includes descriptions especially addressed to a public who does not know the city. Moreover, the author includes a recently released film such as Los últimos días (2013), by Àlex Pastor and David Pastor.
Eugeni Osácar (Barcelona, 1963) gives lessons at the University School of Hotel Management and Tourism (CETT-University of Barcelona) and directs the Masterʼs Degree in Tourism Management Innovation of the UB. He is expert in marketing, heritage and cultural tourism; he specialized in the field of tourism and cinema. He has led projects on cinema tourism, for example Barcelona Movie Walks (2008), the first initiative of cultural tourism based on cinema. In 2012, he published several online guides for smartphones and tablets about cinema tourism in cities such as Barcelona, Paris, London, Roma and Venice.