On Wednesday night, 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 ISII Group and its associated production companies is to produce the award-winning projects, which is why they received, together with all categories, up to 679 scripts. At the dinner, held in the courtyard of Madrid City Hall, there were many famous faces and representatives of the industry and institutions; In addition, the organization had invited the finalists to ensure the presence of the winners, who until then had not been revealed. According to the rules, “the prize consists of 3,000 euros in cash and the opportunity to produce the script with a professional team.”
When the winner of the RTVE special award for the script was announced Burst, and its author, Luis María Ferrández, went up to collect the award, several actresses left the gala, and one of them even contacted Silvia Carvalho, CEO of ISII, the next morning on Instagram, to explain why: in 2021 Ferrández González was accused by six women of different sexual assaults, including four of his students, who did not file legal complaints. Furthermore, in 2024 seven screenwriters resigned from the Board of Directors of the Film Academy and from the institution’s script commission due to the presence of Ferrández among them. Among those who resigned were the two script members of that Board of Directors, Carlos López and Virginia Yagüe, who is also president of Dama, the entity that manages the intellectual rights of the scriptwriters. Ferrández is still, according to the Academy’s website, part of the institution’s script commission.
The gala had featured 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 performers Karla Sofía Gascón, Marta Etura and Aura Garrido, and the scriptwriters and directors Jorge Coira, Kike Maíllo and David Victori, members of the jury (a seventh member, Ernesto Alterio, was missing); and actors, actresses and filmmakers 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 with the gala was restricted to the presence of Fernando López Puig, executive producer of the entity’s Fiction department, for the presentation of an award, exactly the one received by Ferrández. And that, therefore, there is no contract that would allow the name of the public entity to be used on a prize. That name is maintained on the ISII Group website, and in the photos of the organization the phrase “RTVE award for feature film script” clearly appears on the label that is part of the trophy that Ferrández is holding.
At night, the ISII group announced in a statement, without mentioning Ferrández at any time: “ISII Group has decided to temporarily suspend the award of the prize while it analyzes the situation and its possible implications. This measure is adopted as a preventive and prudent decision, without passing judgment, and in coherence with the values of integrity, fairness and professionalism that define the spirit of the contest.”
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, in order to preserve impartiality and avoid any interference in the evaluation process. For this reason, until the day of the gala, no one knows the name of the winner.”
Ferrández is the director of the feature films The wounded screen(2014) y The night an intern found Emiliano Revilla (2016), was nominated for the Goya for best fiction short in 2011 for Hemisphere, and he served as a professor at both the Francisco de Vitoria University and the TAI School in 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 different sexual assaults by Ferrández. Two of them had been her students at TAI, where she taught between 2015 and 2017, and two others in Francisco de Vitoria. In the same article, the filmmaker rejected all the accusations, for which he was not prosecuted. The Francisco de Vitoria University, for its part, carried out an internal investigation that closed after finding “no reasons” to remove him from his job. However, Ferrández left the university.
After the release of the statement on its website, Silvia Carvalho explained, by telephone, to this newspaper that RTVE’s participation “was limited to a special and punctual collaboration within the framework of the usual institutional support for cultural initiatives in the sector, and that it has not intervened in the organization or in the final evaluation or in the decision of the awards.”
About the award, Carvalho assures: “No one from the organization, the jury or collaborating entities knew the authorship of the scripts until the moment of the gala.” And he emphasizes: “Attendance at 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 after several production companies merged. But currently it is 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, specialized respectively in fiction, documentary, animation and film production services), there is also a distribution company (Deep Com Roots), a financial and regulatory consulting firm (KBCF Consulting) and a digital platform for medium-length films of up to 59 minutes (Divergent).
In 2025, the group has started 19 productions: four fiction feature films, eight short films and seven documentaries. Among these feature length productions is Maybeabout 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 her memoirs, with Adriana Ugarte in the role of the trapeze artist and Tania Santana as Sosa. They have also filmed the western Trinidad, 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 girl) and José Ortuño (548 days: captured by a sect).