Miquel Barceló, movie star

For Miquel Barceló it would appear that being the Spanish painter who commands the highest prices on the international art market isn't enough. The artist is set to star in not one, but two films by Catalan director Isaki Lacuesta, to be shown at next month's San Sebastián film festival. Los pasos dobles , inspired by French writer François Augiéras, will screen in the official selection (and will be released in cinemas on September 23), while El cuaderno de barro , a documentary about Barceló's workshop in Mali, is in the Zabaltegi section.

The two films started out as the same project. The original idea emerged from Barceló's decision to take Paso Doble , the performance/installation he has performed with French choreographer Josef Nadj in the Prado Museum and la Lonja de Palma, among other places, to Mali.

"I opted for Isaki Lacuesta, who I didn't know but whose films [...] I had seen," he explains. "He seemed fresh, a new voice. We met each other and I got on well with him. I told him the story of François Augiéras [...] and he worked on a script that mixed Augiéras with Paso Doble ."

In the end, they had enough material for two films. " Los pasos dobles is about me, Augiéras and the search for Block House, a kind of bunker... it all comes from the story I told," the Mallorcan artist continues. Augiéras covered a desert bunker in North Africa in paintings and let it sink into the sand, so nobody would find it until the 21st century.

El cuaderno de barro , meanwhile, is about Barceló's Mali workshop and is a tribute to his friends there, for whom he puts on a clifftop performance of Paso Doble . "It's not a conventional documentary," says Barceló. "It takes from fiction and the other way around. It's what's happening now given that fiction is discredited and reality is discredited - it's a bit of both all at once."