Goya Awards

The Goya Awards, known in Spanish as los Premios Goya, are Spain's main national annual film awards.

The awards were established in 1987, a year after the founding of the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España (Spanish Academy of Cinematic Art and Science), and the first awards ceremony took place on March 16, 1987 at the Teatro Lope de Vega, Madrid. The ceremony continues to take place annually at Centro de Congresos Príncipe Felipe, around the end of January/start of February, and awards are given to films produced during the previous year.

The award itself is a small bronze bust of Francisco de Goya created by the sculptor José Luis Fernández.

History

To reward the best Spanish films of each year, the Spanish Academy of Motion Pictures and Arts decided to create the Goya Awards. The inaugural ceremony took place on March 17, 1987 at the Lope de Vega theatre in Madrid. In 2000, the ceremony took place in Barcelona, at the Barcelona Auditorium. In 2003, a large number of film professionals took advantage of the goya awards ceremony to express their opposition to government support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 2004, the AVT (an association against terrorism in Spain) demonstrated against terrorism and ETA, a paramilitary organization of Basque separatists, in front of the Lope de Vega theatre. In 2005, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was the first president in the history of Spain to attend the event. In 2013, minister of culture and education José Ignacio Wert did not attend, saying he had “other things to do.” Some actors said that this decision reflected the government's lack of respect for their profession and industry.