On Thursday evening, at the Crystal Gallery of the Cibeles Palace in Madrid, the ISII group held its second Break On Time gala to award 10 short film scripts, series, documentaries and feature films. The commitment of the ISII Group and its associated production companies is to produce the awarded projects, which is why they received, together with all categories, up to 679 screenplays. At the dinner, held in the courtyard of the Madrid City Hall, many well-known faces and representatives of the sector and institutions were present; Furthermore, the organization had invited the finalists to guarantee the presence of the winners, who had not been revealed until then. According to the regulations, “the prize consists of 3,000 euros in cash and the opportunity to produce the screenplay with a team of professionals”.
When the winner of the RTVE Special Prize for Screenplay was announced Burst, and its author, Luis María Ferrández, went to collect the award, several actresses left the gala, and one of them even contacted Silvia Carvalho, director of ISII, the next morning on Instagram, to explain the reason: in 2021 Ferrández González was accused by six women of various sexual assaults, including four of his students, who did not file a complaint. Additionally, in 2024, seven screenwriters resigned from the Board of Directors of the Film Academy and the institution’s screenwriting commission due to Ferrández’s presence among them. Among those who resigned were the two screenwriters on that board of directors, Carlos López and Virginia Yagüe, who is also president of Checkers, the body that manages the intellectual rights of screenwriters. Ferrández is still, according to the Academy’s website, part of the institution’s screenwriting commission.
The gala had seen musical performances such as those of Vicco and Marlena, with the actress Antonia San Juan as master of ceremonies, and with faces such as those of the interpreters Karla Sofía Gascón, Marta Etura and Aura Garrido, and the screenwriters and directors Jorge Coira, Kike Maíllo and David Victori, members of the jury (a seventh member, Ernesto Alterio, was missing); and actors, actresses and directors such as Manuela Velasco, Sergio Mur, Chacha Huang, Berta Galo, Irene Arcos, Nuria Gago, Antonio Velázquez, Nerea Barros, Belén Écija, Daniel Ibáñez, Miguel Diosdado, Lucía Caraballo, Ane Rot, Manu Baqueiro or Alejandro Jato.
On Friday afternoon, RTVE sources assured EL PAÍS that their collaboration at the gala was limited to the presence of Fernando López Puig, executive producer of the institution’s Fiction department, for the presentation of an award, exactly the one received by Ferrández. And that, therefore, there is no contract that allows the name of the public body to be used on an award. This name is maintained on the ISII Group website and in the photos of the organization the phrase “RTVE Award for Feature Screenwriting” clearly appears on the label that is part of the trophy that Ferrández is holding in his hand.
Overnight, the ISII group announced in a statement, without mentioning Ferrández at any time: “The ISII group has decided to temporarily suspend the awarding of the prize while it analyzes the situation and its possible implications. This measure is adopted as a preventive and prudent decision, without expressing judgment and in coherence with the values of integrity, correctness and professionalism that define the spirit of the competition.”
According to the organization, “during the reception of the scripts anonymity prevails and the corresponding jury is not aware of the authorship at any time, to preserve impartiality and avoid any interference in the evaluation process. For this reason, until the day of the gala evening, no one knows the name of the winner.”
Ferrández is the director of the feature films The wounded screen(2014) e The night an intern found Emiliano Revilla (2016), was nominated for a Goya for best fiction short film in 2011 for Hemisphere, and served as a professor at both the Francisco de Vitoria University and the TAI School of Madrid. In February 2021, elDiario.es published a report with the testimony of six women who did not want to give their names in which they described several sexual assaults by Ferrández. Two of them had been his students at TAI, where he taught between 2015 and 2017, and another two at Francisco de Vitoria. In the same article the director denied all the accusations, for which he was not prosecuted. The Francisco de Vitoria University, for its part, carried out an internal investigation which closed after finding “no reason” to remove him from his position. However, Ferrández left the university.
After the release of the press release on her website, Silvia Carvalho explained by telephone to this newspaper that RTVE’s participation “was limited to a special and timely collaboration within the framework of the usual institutional support for cultural initiatives in the sector, and that it did not intervene either in the organization or in the final evaluation or in the decision on the prizes”.
Regarding the award, Carvalho assures: “No one from the organization, the jury or the collaborating bodies knew the authorship of the screenplays until the time of the gala.” And he underlines: «Participation in the gala did not imply prior knowledge of identities or personal evaluations unrelated to the text presented».
The ISII group, based in the Canary Islands, was born in 2023 from the merger of several production companies. But it is currently not only dedicated to production: in addition to the four production companies that are part of the company (Inefable Productions, Isora Films, Sinapsis Studios and SIA Servicios Audiovisuales, specializing respectively in fiction, documentary, animation and film production services), there is also a distribution company (Deep Com Roots), a financial and regulatory consultancy company (KBCF Consulting) and a digital platform for medium films up to 59 minutes (Divergent).
As of 2025, the group has launched 19 productions: four fiction feature films, eight short films and seven documentaries. Among these feature film productions is Perhapsabout an imaginary love relationship between the Canarian writer Natalia Sosa Ayala and the famous circus artist Pinito del Oro, who met in 1968 when the former helped the latter write his memoirs, with Adriana Ugarte in the role of the trapeze artist and Tania Santana in that of Sosa. They also made the western Trinity, with Paz Vega, Karla Sofía Gascón and Gabriela Andrada, and co-directed by Laura Alvea (The sleeping woman and episodes of the series The Snow Maiden) and José Ortuño (548 days: captured by a cult).
