Sergi Dies Masterclass

Editing as Writing: The Glints in the Screenplay that Sparkle When Cut

Sergi Dies explores the ins and outs of the art of editing by looking at his work on Alfonso Amador’s Camagroga (2020), which is competing in l’Alternativa Official this year.

At the director’s insistence, Sergi Dies was also given a screenwriting credit for Camagroga. But how exactly do an editor’s choices manage to have a bearing on the screenplay? German copyright law already gives film editors certain rights to their work, whereas in Spain they are still considered to play a merely technical role.

In this masterclass, Sergi Dies will share some of the cutting room secrets to teasing felicitous rhymes out of footage, bearing in mind that editing is usually the final writing stage, thus ruling out any further changes to the screenplay. Guided more by intuition than simply mechanically cutting and splicing, film editors often feel their way through footage like dowsers seeking underground synergies to bring films to life.

Sergi Dies

Sergi Dies graduated in audiovisual communication from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, where he specialised in filmmaking and screenwriting. His keen interest in language in general and in the language of filmmaking in particular drew him into editing, initially in the world of television and advertising. His career as a feature film editor got under way with Monos como Becky (Joaquim Jordà, 1999), followed by 200 km (Colectivo Discusión 14, 2003), El taxista ful (Jo Sol, 2005), La doble vida del faquir (Esteve Riambau, Elisabet Cabeza, 2005), Dies d’agost (Marc Recha, 2006), El somni (Christophe Farnarier, 2008), Squat, la ville est à nous ! (Christophe Coello, 2011), De nens (Joaquim Jordà, 2013), Una corriente salvaje (Nuria Ibáñez, 2018), Espines (Adán Aliaga, 2018), Entre dos aguas (Isaki Lacuesta, 2018), El cuarto reino (Adán Aliaga, Àlex Lora, 2019) and Nueve Sevillas (Gonzalo García Pelayo, Pedro G. Romero, 2020), among others. In 2017 he codirected and edited Morir de día with Laia Manresa. He is a member of the Catalan Audiovisual Editors Association (AMMAC).