Today Málaga and its province are a city completely associated with cinema. The numerous festivals, filming, meetings and events held on its territory bear witness to this. But it wasn't always like that. Although historically cinema was one of the most popular shows in the city and its villages there was a generation, that of baby boom, which was responsible for programming and rethinking cinema from an artistic and cultural perspective that taught us to see it and consider it beyond simple entertainment. Juan Maldonado (Málaga, 1960) is one of those pioneer boomers. Son of the owner of a summer cinema in a popular district of Málaga today disappeared, where he learned to project films from very small, film critic from school, programmer, montador, founding member of cineclubs from very young, cultural manager before that word existed, author of hundreds and hundreds of texts and monographs on cinema and promoter of infinite activities and cycles on cinema and comic in the early years of Malagueña democracy Juan Maldonado is the recent and living memory of the cinema in Málaga. First, because it has a prodigious memory and a wonderful mind capable of seeing bright details where the rest only see shadows. And above all, because John was the man who was always there, although he never stayed to pick up the medals.

The University Cineclub, the Film Week and the History, the municipal Cinemateca that was the germ of the Albéniz cinema, the first editions of the Spanish Film Festival, the History Week of Malaga, the film programming of the Provincial Cultural Centre with the magnificent Cine Club of 27 where it has been a decade projecting silent cinema, the press cabinet of the Book Fair of Malaga, the great invention of the Málaga Film Day... its radio programs, television and its sections in newspapers are only some of the activities that carry its idea, signature, seal or execution, along with its cultural institutions as a collaborator.

Two years after a stroke of which he is recovering, John is one of those people who deserve recognition. Mainly, because he's never claimed it. Juan Maldonado is a memory, transmitter, programmer, cultural agitator and living archive of the Malagasy popular and audiovisual culture. Juan doesn't need us to exaggerate a importance he didn't have because he had. He still has it and I wish he was recognized aloud as he deserves it. All it takes now is to thank you in front of a film screen, one like that so many times, for your family or for cineclubs and institutions, filled with dreams and films that he himself learned to ride and project from a child, when the cinema was still a roll of celluloid and the place of the largest stories ever told.

Hector Márquez