On Thursday, March 31, 2022, Her Majesty Queen Letizia of Spain presented awards during the closing ceremony of 2nd Edition of the School Short Film Festival project, Diversidad en Serie: Historias que Merecen ser Contadas, at the Casa del Lector in Madrid.

The project, promoted by Netflix and the Fundación FAD Juventud, aims to promote discourses on diversity (gender, cultural and/or generational) and motivate artistic or audiovisual vocations through the scriptwriting of short films by students between 14 and 20 years.  

Almost 900 schoolchildren from different educational centers have participated in this edition, presenting 109 short film scripts with stories of diversity.

Of the scripts presented, there have been five winning teams that have agreed, in addition to a master class with Ms. Susana Casares, film director and head of talent training at Netflix Spain-Portugal, to have their works professionally recorded in the hand of the artistic company Lanau. The winning scripts have shown some situation or content that reflects a reflection on the importance of diversity, especially those referring to cultural, gender and intergenerational diversity.

Miss Daniela Valentina Mangones Paternina, from Valencia, has been awarded for her script, Different Flavors of Pizza, which tells the story of a social experiment that tests the differences and peculiarities of a large human group that ends up understanding each other because of what they do have in common. 

Not Everything is Always What it Seems, a script by Miss Laura Chana Morales from Madrid,  has been awarded for telling the story of Mia, a young woman discriminated against for her physical appearance who is unjustly accused of a robbery. She gets shelter, reasons to move on, and the truth to be known, thanks to friendship. 

The script for, Daniela, confronts discrimination based on gender in the school. The award-winning authors, Miss Natalia Alamillos Agudo, Miss Patricia López Merino, and Miss Alba Campos Clavo from Valencia, highlight the situation of some Transgendered people and the need for support from their classmates, to denounce discriminatory treatment by a teacher. 

For their part, Mr. Víctor Sánchez Romero, Mr. Raúl Gaia, and Mr. Erik Borrella Navarro from Valencia tell in their award-winning script, Alcalde, the story of a young mayor who understands cultural diversity as an opportunity for progress and the generation of social wealth. This character has the idea of ​​repopulating his town and doing it better with a call to people “outside”.  

The last of the recognized scripts have been, My Story, by Mr. David Valladarez Melgar from Valencia which narrates the biography of a young man who decides to go live with his mother in a country “On the Other Side of the Pond”. The protagonist of it faces various types of discrimination, all around having to adapt to being “different” and the suffering that this entails. 

Congrats to all the winners!