Biography
Gerardo Olivares (born 1964) is a Spanish filmmaker and screenwriter residing in Madrid with his wife and two children. He was the first Spanish man to win the Golden Spike at the renowned Seminci film festival in Valladolid for his film "14 kilómetros." In 2019, he received the Cinema for Peace Award for Justice for his film "Two Catalonias."
An avid traveler, Olivares began exploring the world in 1987 while studying Information Science at the Complutense University of Madrid. At twenty, he borrowed a Vespa from his brother and spent four months traveling to the North Cape in Lapland, where he created his first report on the nomads living beyond the Arctic Circle. This report was published in Los Aventureros (The Adventurer). Shortly after, he started working under journalist and writer Enrique Meneses, whom he regards as his mentor.
A year later, Olivares journeyed extensively across the Sahara in a Seat Panda, a desert he would revisit multiple times. During this trip, he developed his first major documentary project, La Ruta de las Córdobas (The Cordobas Route), a journey from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego following 36 cities, towns, and geographical features named Cordoba. Traveling for a year and a half along the Americas in three all-terrain vehicles, the project resulted in an 8-episode series aired by TVE in 1992, achieving significant ratings success.
In 1994, Olivares circled the African continent by land, traveling from Morocco to South Africa and then to Egypt as Director of Ruta de los Exploradores (Path of the Explorers), co-produced by TVE. In 1997, he crossed Asia from Spain to Singapore in two trucks for the series Road to Samarkand, which became the most-watched program on TVE 2 in 2000 and earned the GECA award for record viewership.
After years of directing and writing documentaries, Olivares ventured into fiction in 2005 with the support of producer Jose Maria Morales (Wanda Films) through La Gran final (The Great Match), filmed in Mongolia, the Sahara, and the Brazilian Amazon. The film garnered several international awards and was selected for festivals including the Berlin International Film Festival, Copenhagen International Film Festival, Galway Film Fleadh, World Cinema Festival, Cap Town, and the Desert Nights Filmfest in Rome. It was also nominated for Best Film at the Malaga Spanish Film Festival.
In 2006, he wrote and directed 14 kilómetros, a film addressing African immigration that won over 15 international awards, establishing him as a committed filmmaker in Spanish cinema. His 2010 feature, Entrelobos (Among Wolves), based on the true story of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, became one of the highest-grossing Spanish films of that year, attracting over half a million theatergoers. It narrates the story of a young shepherd in a remote mountain area who befriends and eventually leads a pack of wolves.
