The celebration of the International Book Day at Instituto Cervantes in Manila have become an indispensable event of Manila's cultural calendar during the Philippine summertime all along these years. However, this year, April 23 coincides with another festivity which definitely is not possible to compete with in this country: the Holy Week. Given the coincidence of dates, we decided to celebrate a week in advance our activities and held the International Book Day on 16 April.
The program of activities foreseen was wide and varied: a book fair where bookselling was much anticipated, Spanish gastronomy and special activities for the young ones, a recital, concerts, film screenings and also four contests.
The Center's decoration for this day was very special. An odd group of readers occupied our facilities:
This was how our exhibit gallery looked like:
Something that definitely attracted the curiosity of our visitors:
We also took advantage of the event to showcase the new signages in our library:
But definitely the main attraction was the book fair in the patio where we have the book market dubbed as "Books and Roses".
Our director, Mr. José Rodriguez, and the ambassador of Spain in Manila, Mr. Jorge Manuel Domeq officially inaugurated the book fair:
The fair consisted in the bookselling in which quantities of books were sold at a symbolic price. Following the Spanish tradition, a rose was given to every book buyer.
The influx of the buying public was remarkable during the entire day:
But not only spiritual food was offered during the day...
and the other one was a jazz trio concert: HDC Trío, with Heliodoro 'Dingdong' Fiel on keyboards, Charles Bautista with electric guitar and Harry Rodriguez on drums.
The morning began with a drawing workshop for the kids. They painted, drawn a short story or created their own illustrated book. This was taken cared of by a professional artist, Steph Palallos.
Both the young and old ones attended the storytelling session, proposed by the library, in which we have chosen a story that we believed was very appropriate for this day: Saint Jorge and the dragon. The legend was recounted by two fun storytellers: Toni and Ito.
With a very special dragon...
To cap off the day specially dedicated to the children, we offered two more activities:
The film screening of the animated film "Nocturna", which received a Goya Award for Best Animation Film and one of the best samples of this film genre in Spain in recent years.
The Spanish Rhymes concluded the children's event. It was aimed to make the young ones sing, with or without the karaoke, Spanish songs.
For the benefit of the older audience, we had the "Bersong EuroPinoy3" slated in the afternoon. It was the 3rd edition of the Berso Euro Pinoy, a poetical recital in which each participant reads his/her chosen poem. It became a poetry chain in different languages courtesy of the various EU conutries participanting in the event and some Filipino poets representing the Philippines.
The day ended with a film screening of the film "El secreto de sus ojos".
The announcement of winners of the different contests also took place during the event:
"The Photo of the Day Contest" in which various images taken during the day were submitted as entries to the contest. And the winner was this photo:
"Photo Contest "Readers". The rules were simple, only to send a photo of one's self or of another person reading. And this was the winning photo:
Last but not the least, we also had the "Fast Fiction Contest", but given the few number of entries, we decided to declare the contest null.
The program Espacio Cervantes of Cervantes TV has aired a short information about these activities.
N.º 633. Noticias destacadas
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