Ocho apellidos vascos / Spanish Affair (Emilio Martínez Lázaro, 2014)

Dani Rovira and Clara Lago

Spain's biggest-ever box office hit is another film screening in San Sebastián as part of the 'Made in Spain' section, and will also be in London next month. It is daft but a lot of fun.
My review is over at Eye for Film.

10th London Spanish Film Festival, 25th September - 5th October

Libertarias (1996), showing as part of the Vicente Aranda retrospective

Eye for Film have a short preview that I've written about the 10th edition of the London Spanish Film Festival, which starts next week. I'll be reviewing about ten nine of the films in total and will update this post with links as and when the reviews go online, rather than creating separate posts for each one. 

• Con la pata quebrada (Diego Galán, 2013)
• Stella cadente (Lluís Miñarro, 2014)
• Tots volem el millor per a ella (Mar Coll, 2013) [I have also reviewed the film for Take One - here]
• Las maestras de la República (Pilar Pérez Solano, 2013)
• El somni (Franc Aleu, 2014)
• Baratometrajes 2.0 (Daniel San Román and Hugo Serra, 2014) [my post from earlier this year on the longer version of the documentary is here]
• Libertarias (Vicente Aranda, 1996)
• Amantes (Vicente Aranda, 1991)
• Carmen (Vicente Aranda, 2003)

10,000 Km (David Marques-Marcet, 2014)

Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer

I have reviewed 10,000 Km (here) for Eye for Film. The film is showing at the San Sebastián Film Festival (19th-27th September) in the 'Made in Spain' section and will also screen at the London Film Festival next month. Earlier this week it made the shortlist of candidates (alongside Vivir es fácil con ojos cerrados (David Trueba, 2013) and El Niño (Daniel Monzón, 2014) - the latter of which will also be in London) to be Spain's entry for the 2015 Academy Awards. It's well worth catching if you get the opportunity.

Speaking Truth About Power: Documentary, Censorship, and Rocío

Rocío (Fernando Ruiz Vergara, 1980), a.k.a. the rabbit hole I fell down during August.
    It started with a book review. I was working my way through a backlog of film magazines, when a book review (by Antonio Santamarina) for El caso Rocío: La historia de una película secuestrada por la transición (edited by Ángel del Río Sánchez, Francisco Espinosa Maestre, and José Luis Tirado) caught my eye in the May edition of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. 'A film hijacked by the Transition' piqued my interest, as did the fact that the film was a documentary (yes, that is what I'm supposed to be looking into at the moment) and that the book came with both a copy of the uncensored version of the film and a documentary, El caso Rocío (José Luis Tirado, 2013), about the making of Rocío and its subsequent legal troubles. And then I watched it. In fact, I think I've watched Rocío half a dozen times now, but I can't really explain why it has drawn me in as it has.
    I set myself challenges on here, or start projects, in an attempt to give myself a structure to write within. I'm someone who thinks through writing (anyone who has spoken to me immediately after a film viewing will know that I'm rarely coherent in my thoughts at that stage), but it's not often that I write due to a sense of compulsion - Rocío is, however, one of those instances. I wrote because the film was stuck in my head, because I couldn't find anything written about it in English (beyond a New York Times story about the trial), because in the emphasis placed on the censorship of the film people seem to have avoided writing about it as a film (which is a shame because it is an incredibly rich, and visually distinctive, piece of filmmaking), and because it tapped into the sheer enjoyment I get from properly delving into an unfamiliar film and working out how it 'functions'. I decided to focus on the two aspects that pulled me down the rabbit hole - the story of the injustice suffered by Fernando Ruiz Vergara and Rocío, and the visual components of the film itself.
    What I've written is over at Mediático.

Note: the censored version of the film is available on YouTube with English subtitles.