Arturo Valls

In 1998, Arturo Valls donned a black suit, put on dark sunglasses and began chasing politicians with a microphone on Caiga quien caiga. He left his journalism studies in Valencia unfinished because the streets offered a crash course in quick reflexes and nerve. That brash reporter seemed destined for pure studio entertainment, but he had other plans up his sleeve.

In 2005 he landed the gray suit of Jesús Quesada in Camera Café. In front of a vending machine and with a fixed camera shot, he refined a recognizable archetype of Spanish workplace roguery. It amounted to 530 episodes in which he learned the value of the comedic pause and the weight of what happens outside the frame.

Nobody suspected back then that this lazy salesman would end up in executive producer roles.

In 2001 he had a supporting role in Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella, and in 2007 he took part in Casual Day. Meanwhile, broadcast television tied him to daily game shows with top ratings that guaranteed him steady income and constant presence in millions of homes.

Buying scripts instead of sports cars

In 2015 he took a leap of faith by founding the production company Pólvora Films. He told the press that others make money and buy a sports car, but he preferred to spend his savings on buying a screenplay. His first venture as a producer came with Los del túnel in 2016, a comedy directed by Pepón Montero about the absurd psychological aftermath faced by a group of survivors.

Three years later he rescued from oblivion the final film project of José Luis Cuerda. Nobody wanted to finance Tiempo después, but Valls put together a consortium of production companies to shoot, in 2018, that surreal fable starring the core of comedians from La Mancha. Cuerda was able to film his farewell thanks to that personal commitment.

In 2021 he doubled down by backing Verónica Echegui's move into directing with the short film Tótem Loba. The film won the Goya Award for Best Live-Action Short Film in 2022 and confirmed his interest in projects far from easy gags.

And the gamble came at a high cost.

The mud of the commercial balance sheet

Because producing independent film in Spain rarely adds up on the books. In 2020 his production company was carrying an accumulated negative balance of over 180,000 euros, which forced constant capital injections just to keep the structure running between shoots. But Valls kept pushing for a bigger place in the box office game.

In 2022, he made the leap to feature films with Camera Café, la película, handing directing duties to Ernesto Sevilla to blow up the TV format with visual madness. In 2024, he headlined Mala persona and joined ensemble casts on the series Atasco. In 2025, he landed a string of box office hits with Un funeral de locos and Pequeños calvarios.

Commercial cinema demands a relentless, assembly-line pace, where a producer's box office return rarely exceeds 15 percent after the exhibitor and distributor take their share. In the Valencia commercial registry, Pólvora Films closed 2022 with share capital increased to 1.5 million euros to absorb ongoing operating losses.