Gerardo Olivares

Gerardo Olivares (born 1964) is a Spanish filmmaker and screenwriter. He is married with two children and lives in Madrid. He was the first Spanish man to win the Golden Spike at the prestigious Seminci film festival in Valladolid for his film "14 kilómetros". He received the 2019 Cinema for Peace Award for Justice for his film 'Two Catalonias'.

A tireless traveler, Olivares began to travel the world in 1987 while studying Information Science at the Complutense University of Madrid. At the age of twenty he borrowed a Vespa motorcycle from his brother and for four months traveled in the North Cape in Lapland, where he did his first reportage on the nomads who live beyond the Arctic Circle. Back in Madrid, the report was published in Los Aventureros (The Adventurer). Months later he started working under the direction of the journalist and writer Enrique Meneses, whom he has always considered his master.

A year later Olivares covered a good part of the Sahara with a Seat Panda, a desert he later crossed on multiple occasions. During this trip he began to mature what would be his first major documentary project, La Ruta de las Córdobas (The Cordobas Route), a trip from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, following the 36 cities, towns and geographical features with the name of Cordoba. For a year and a half he traveled along the spine of the Americas in three all-terrain vehicles, and the result was a series of 8 episodes issued in 1992 by TVE with great ratings success.