D'A Festival - Getting Started

El Incendio / The Fire (dir. Juan Schnitman)

    My first review from D'A Festival - of Argentinian drama El Incendio / The Fire (dir. Juan Schnitman) - has gone up over at Eye for Film (here). I'm a bit behind with the reviews but I had the opportunity to interview some of the filmmakers in attendance, so I've prioritised that in the last couple of days. Those interviews - with Ion de Sosa, Chema García Ibarra, and Miguel Llansó - will (probably) appear next week.

    This is my last day in Barcelona and I still have two more films to see, but reviews are forthcoming for: Obra (dir. Gregorio Graziosi), No todo es vigilia / Not All Is Vigil (dir. Hermes Paralluelo), El arca de Noé / Noah's Ark (dir. Adán Aliaga and David Valero), Sueñan los androides / Androids Dream (dir. Ion de Sosa), Favula (dir. Raúl Perrone), Crumbs (dir. Miguel Llansó), A misteriosa morte de Pérola / The Mysterious Death of Pérola (dir. Guto Parente and Ticiana Augusto Lima), Chorus (dir. François Delisle), and Queen of Earth (dir. Alex Ross Perry). Most of them will be at Eye for Film (unless they already have a review for the film in question) but I will put up links here. I'll also be writing about the festival in general, and will look specifically at the Spanish films in the (Im)Possible Futures section.

Five films I want to see at D'A Festival

Crumbs

I thought I'd highlight a film from each of the five days that I'll be in Barcelona - not all of the films are Spanish, but that's a reflection of what I'll be watching. The details here are deliberately scant because I avoid reading too much about films before seeing them.

Monday 27th: A Misteriosa Morte de Pérola (Guto Parente, 2015)

I am also keen on catching El incendio (Juan Schnitman, 2015) but that doesn't start until 10pm - given that I'll have been at the airport from around 6am, there's a strong possibility that I won't manage to stay the course on my first day. So for my pick I'll settle on this Brazilian mid-lengther about which I know nothing other than the contents of this very creepy trailer (the foley artists are earning their keep here).

Tuesday 28th: No todo es vigilia / Not All Is Vigil (Hermes Paralluelo, 2014)

A love story of a long-married couple who are becoming too infirm to take care of each other, this film gained a lot of positive word of mouth on twitter - and glowing reviews - after screening at San Sebastián last year. The subtitled trailer can be found here.

Wednesday 29th: Sueñan los androides / Androids Dream (Ion de Sosa, 2014)

Directed by the cinematographer of El Futuro (and this trailer suggests some visual similarities with that film), this low voltage sci-fi takes place in Benidorm in 2052 and is one of the central films in the festival's (Im)Possible Futures section.  

Thursday 30th: Crumbs (Miguel Llansó, 2015)

Another (Im)Possible Futures film and another one that I first heard about on twitter (this time in relation to the Rotterdam Film Festival earlier this year). Crumbs looks like an Ethiopian cross between the journeys in the Baba Yaga fairytale and The Wizard of Oz. With Nazis and a bonus Father Christmas.

Friday 1st: Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015)

An examination of the friendship between two miserable women (Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston) and a downward spiral into delusion and madness - sounds like perfect Friday night viewing and a great way to end my trip!

The next time I post, I'll be in Barcelona!

London Spanish Film Festival - Spring Weekend 2015

Image taken from the festival's email mailout

    The London Spanish Film Festival's 5th Spring Weekend runs this Friday to Sunday - the programme and schedule can be found here. 
    I don't have time to write up anything new this week, but I can recommend the three films from the line-up that I've seen - Todos están muertos, 10,000 Km, and La isla mínima. I haven't written about the latter yet, but the other two featured in my top 10 new Spanish films of 2014 and I also reviewed 10,000 Km last autumn.
    If - like me - you can't make it to London to see the films, El Niño got a UK DVD release before Christmas and the other four are all available on DVD in Spain (the three that I've seen all have optional English subs).

Preview: D'A Festival

    The fifth edition of D’A - Festival Internacional de Cine D'Autor de Barcelona (D'A Festival for short) starts in a couple of weeks and runs between 24th April and 3rd May. They announced their full programme on Friday, and I've written a preview piece over at Eye for Film - here. 
    I will be in Barcelona for five days during the festival. I had to book my flights a few weeks ago without knowing the full lineup or the actual schedule, so there are a couple of films that I'm disappointed to miss (namely Jonás Trueba's Los exiliados románticos / The Romantic Exiles (2015), although I'm fairly sure that will pop up over here at some point). But they've programmed a wide range of films that I've not seen before (both Spanish and otherwise - I'm looking forward to watching a Bulgarian film with subtitles in castellano) - and I'll also be checking out the listings for 'normal' cinemas too. 
    There will be stuff on the films I see - as well as the festival / Barcelona - appearing on here, and I'll also be writing reviews for Eye for Film. I'm not entirely sure how I'll set it out on here - it will probably depend on how much gets written while I'm actually there. To be continued...
UPDATE: There's now a handy PDF of the schedule available to download.

A Collective Impulse: an overview

This post has been moved to my new blog - you can find it here.

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I'd like to thank the following people for allowing me access to their work: Luis López Carrasco (twice over), Xurxo Chirro, Ramiro Ledo, Víctor Moreno (for giving me access to Edificio España before the DVD was available), Juan Rayos, Lourdes Pérez at Producción El Viaje (and Jonay García at Digital 104 for passing that request along), and Deica audiovisual.
If you click on the 'el otro cine español' label below, you will see posts relating to my ongoing, broader project.

Mini Project: Un impulso colectivo

    Since early 2014 I've been seeking out films that fall into the nebulous and ever-expanding category of 'el otro cine español' and thinking about how I might approach writing about them collectively. Documentary films within this category have been my main focus for more than six months now although I've also simultaneously drifted into looking at documentaries more broadly (i.e. outside of Spain and from a range of eras), which has made 'progress' slower than I'd intended. I have an idea of how to group a particular set of documentaries together in order to write about them, but I've still got a few more to track down and watch before I get started.
    I've also continued watching Spanish cinema generally (I will write something about La isla mínima, honest. No, really, I will) but also other 'otro cine español' films that don't fit within my current documentary focus (I'm hoping to get around to watching Magical Girl and Hermosa juventud in the next month). As I've said in previous posts, it's such a disparate and unwieldy collection of films and filmmakers that it's difficult to know where to begin (last July I explained why I've started with the documentaries) and how to break it down into more manageable sub-sections. But it recently occurred to me that the 'Un impulso colectivo' [A Collective Impulse] section at last year's D'A - Festival Internacional de Cinema D'Autor de Barcelona was precisely designed to give an overview of this cinema being made on the margins. So in the build-up to the D'A festival announcing their 2015 line-up (they have already said that there won't be a similar section this year but that homegrown films will feature across all sections of the programme), I thought I'd take a look back at the fourteen films programmed by Carlos Losilla (the section takes its name from his September 2013 article in Caimán Cuadernos de Cine) in 2014. Taken together the films stand as a panoramic snapshot of Spanish cinema(s) now on the move (collectively and as individual filmmakers). The fourteen films are [UPDATE 03/04/15 - I'm currently writing the overview piece but explaining what each film is about is cluttering it up. My solution is that I'm going to add a brief outline of each film below and include a link to this post at the start of the overview]:

• Árboles / Trees (dir. Colectivo Los Hijos [Javier Fernández Vázquez, Luis López Carrasco, Natalia Marín Sancho]). An essay film combining the storytelling surrounding colonialism with an exploration of different architectural spaces and how they relate to their inhabitants.
• Las aventuras de Lily ojos de gato / The Adventures of Cat-Eyed Lily (dir. Yonay Boix). Follows the eponymous Lily on a carousing night out with friends in Madrid as she tries to get herself together and resolve personal problems.
• Cenizas / Ashes (dir. Carlos Balbuena). A stunningly photographed, black and white, and near wordless tale of a man returning to his home town in the aftermath of a family funeral and exploring the surrounding area.
• Edificio España / The Building (dir. Víctor Moreno). A documentary recording the renovation of the monumental Edificio España, the international workforce carrying out the work, and the beginning of the economic crisis.
• El Futuro / The Future (dir. Luis López Carrasco). A house party in the aftermath of the 1982 Socialist victory with the generation who mistook that election for an end in itself.
• Une histoire seule (dir. Xurxo Chirro & Aguinaldo Fructuoso). Two friends join forces via Skype to make a film about Geneva inspired by Jean-Luc Godard.
• Ilusión / Hope (dir. Daniel Castro). Intending to give some hope to his fellow countrymen in such trying times, a writer-director aims to make a musical (Los Pactos de la Moncloa) about the political pacts made during the Transition.
• Paradiso (dir. Omar A. Razzak). A documentary about the day-to-day running of the Duque de Alba, the last Sala X (porn cinema) in Madrid, and the interactions between projectionist Rafael, soon-to-retire box-office operator Luisa, and the cinema's clientele.
• Los primeros días / The First Days (dir. Juan Rayos). A documentary recording the rehearsals and performances of a play written for adults but here performed by four ten year olds - over the course of two years they grow up before our eyes.
• Slimane (dir. José A. Alayón). When young immigrants come of age they're forced to leave the child care centres that have been their homes without any further assistance. Homeless, Slimane and his friends have to find safe places to sleep, money to get by on, and ways to kill time.
• Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (dir. Jordi Morató). A documentary telling the story of a man who built his own jungle by the side of a highway, and how he rebuilt and destroyed it three times.
• El triste olor de la carne / The Sad Smell of Flesh (dir. Cristóbal Arteaga). Alfredo has been keeping up appearances since losing his job but over the course of one morning has to try to avert the repossession of his home and his family discovering the truth.
• Uranes (dir. Chema García Ibarra). A deadpan tale of extraterrestrials, grandparents, and dark goings-on in the countryside.
• Vidaextra / ExtraLife (dir. Ramiro Ledo). The September 2010 General Strike in Barcelona blends with Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance to feed into an overnight discussion between five anonymous friends who are trying to oppose the state of things.

    I'm in the process of working my way through watching them (I actually saw four of them - El Futuro, Edificio España, Sobre la marxa, and Cenizas - last year). Some of them are available commercially (either as DVDs or VOD), but the majority aren't - in those cases, I've contacted the filmmakers or production companies in order to access them. At the moment I'm theoretically - one DVD has yet to arrive - able to (re)watch twelve of the fourteen (the missing two are among the ones I've seen previously). My intention is to write an overview of them as a group within the next couple of weeks, and then possibly write about individual films in more detail later on (it will depend on how they fit within the other things I'm researching). To be continued...

Os Fenómenos / Aces (Alfonso Zarauza, 2014)

Lola Dueñas and Miguel de Lira

    The Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival at the Cornerhouse in Manchester has had a change of format this year - instead of its usual two weeks in March, they're doing three 'weekenders' throughout the year. I'm hoping that this is simply because they're currently in the process of moving building, and not a permanent change. This weekend has been the first one (programme), the next will be in June with a focus on Mexican cinema (given that this coincides with the Edinburgh Film Festival - and this year they're taking Mexico as their main country focus - I presume that there will be an overlap with the films screening in Edinburgh), and third will be at some point in the autumn. 
    The range of films and times of day they were shown for this first weekend meant that it wasn't worth me travelling down to Manchester, but I have reviewed Os Fenómenos / Aces (Alfonso Zarauza, 2014) - the only Spanish film in the line-up that I had been looking out for - for Eye for Film (here).

My recommendations for Spanish-language films showing at Glasgow Film Festival

View the full size poster (with screening details) here

The Glasgow Film Festival begins this week (18th February - 1st March). Unfortunately I won't be going, but I thought I'd highlight a few of the Spanish-language films that'll be screening.

Two films I've seen:

10,000 Km (Carlos Marques-Marcet, 2014)
I reviewed this directorial debut last September (for Eye for Film - here) and it ended up in my list of favourites of the year. The film is a relationship drama in which the two leads (Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer) are kept apart for most of the narrative - communicating via various forms of telecommunications and social media - but they nonetheless successfully create and maintain a palpable emotional connection. It works because Marques-Marcet has the imagination and ingenuity to circumvent the limits of his low budget (and it is one of the few films I've seen to represent technology in a way that is both believable and immersive for the viewer), and both actors (the only people we see - the film could function as a stage play) deliver nuanced and engaging performances.

La Isla Mínima / Marshland (Alberto Rodríguez, 2014)
I watched this thriller on DVD at the end of last week and I'm disappointed that I won't get the chance to see it on the big screen because the recurring aerial shots of the unusual landscape make this a visually distinctive film (it also won 10 Goya awards just over a week ago - including Best Film, Director, and Leading Actor). In 1980, two detectives - Pedro (Raúl Arévalo) and Juan (Javier Gutiérrez) - are sent from Madrid to investigate the disappearance of two teenage sisters in the marshlands of Guadalquivir in southern Spain. This was a time of political transition in Spain and the two men effectively represent the old (Juan) and the new (Pedro), and the compromises that Spain would have to make in order to move towards democracy. That makes the film sound more schematic than it is, as Rodríguez is more interested in the grey areas of overlap than black and white demarcations, and he also keeps the crime story moving along at a cracking pace. I'll be writing something about it for the blog - it should be up within the next week.


Two films I'd like to see:

Relatos salvajes / Wild Tales (Damián Szifron, 2014)
An Argentinian-Spanish co-production (and I consider anything with El Deseo's name on it worth checking out), Wild Tales is a series of six short stories threaded together through the common theme of the worm that turns. I have yet to read a bad word about it (I'm talking general impressions - I've avoided reading details because the tales are apparently quite twisty), and most people who have seen it seem to want to see it again (and you can't get a much higher recommendation than that). It also has a top-notch case: Darín! Sbaraglia! Grandinetti!

Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, 2014)
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Jauja is the first of Alonso's films to be made with a screenwriting partner (Fabian Casas) and a professional cast (headed by Viggo Mortensen). The basic outline is that a 19th-century Danish military man (Mortensen) is searching for his runaway teenage daughter across the wilds of a South American landscape and goes on a metaphysical journey in the process. Again, I've avoided reading too many of the details about the film (Keyframe did a round-up of critics' opinions during Cannes and the New York Film Festival, should you wish to know more) but although critical reception was by no means unanimously positive, this is definitely one I'd like to catch up with.

IV Festival Márgenes - free to view online (13th - 31st December)

    Until the last day of 2014, the online platform Márgenes is making the twelve films that played in competition at its 4th Festival (and one that played outside of the official line-up) available to view for free. The online side of the festival started on the 13th December, but I didn't get a chance to take a look until I finished work for Christmas - I've only managed to watch a handful of the films so far, but I thought I should point it out on here before it ends.

    The festival started as an exclusively online event but now organises screenings in Madrid, Córdoba, Barcelona, Montevideo, México DF, Monterrey and Bogotá, before putting the films online. The point of the festival is to highlight those films that have not had a commercial release or that otherwise fall outside of the normal distribution circuit. To be eligible, they need to be more than 40 minutes in duration and originate from Spain, Latin America, or Portugal (the countries included are: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Nicaragua, Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay and Venezuela) - you can see the full list of criteria here. Many of the films in the 2014 edition have played at other festivals and won multiple prizes - but the list of winners for the IV Festival Márgenes have also now been announced.

    The official selection of films streaming for free encompass documentary and narrative fiction (links take you to the film - I've indicated which ones have English subtitles):

• África 815 (Pilar Monsell, 2014, Spain, 66m) [subtitled] 
• Carmita (Israel Cardenas and Laura Amelia Guzman, 2013, Mexico, 70m)  
• Crónica de un comité / A Committee Chronicle (José Luis Sepúlveda and Carolina Adriazola, 2014, Chile, 97m) 
• El gran vuelo / The Great Flight (Carolina Astudillo, 2014, Spain, 60m)  
• El rostro / The Face (Gustavo Fontán, 2013, Argentina, 64m) 
• Lacrau (João Vladimiro, 2013, Portugal, 99m) 
• Las altas presiones / The High Pressures (Ángel Santos, 2014, Spain, 85m) [subtitled] 
• Letters from Parliament Square (Carlos Serrano Azcona, 2014, Spain / UK, 53m) [in English]  
• Los ausentes / The Absent (Nicolás Pereda, 2014, Mexico / Spain / France, 80m) [only viewable in Spain] 
• Propaganda (Colectivo MAFI, 2014, Chile, 60m) [subtitled]  
• Todas las cosas que no están / All the Things That Are Not There (Teresa Solar Abboud, 2014, Spain, 42m) [in English] 
• Vida active / Active Life (Susana Nobre, 2013, Portugal, 92m) [subtitled] 

    I've watched four so far - El gran vuelo, All the Things That Are Not There, Las altas presiones (which won the Nuevas olas / New Waves section at the Seville European Film Festival last month), and África 815 - but will hopefully manage to watch a couple more before they disappear (having watched Pablo Larraín's No last year, I'd like to see Propaganda, which is about the 2013 Chilean elections). A common thread across the ones I've seen is 'absence' or the past being retraced through fragments - although in Las altas presiones this is manifested in how the protagonist's (Andrés Gertrúdix) return home heightens his sense of having lost who he really is - and judging by the synopses of the other films that theme unites many of them. Both El gran vuelo and África 815 (my favourite of the four) use a combination of photographs with diaries / memoirs and letters to explore (real) lives hidden from view on the surface. 

El gran vuelo

    El gran vuelo is the story of Clara Pueyo Jornet, and examines her clandestine existence from the Civil War years up to the point when - sentenced to death (she was an active militant for the Communist Party) - she escaped from Les Corts prison in Barcelona in the early 1940s by walking out of the front door (the great flight of the title) and was never seen again. Jornet was constrained by the times she lived in. There was no accepted space for political women in that era - the danger of Jornet's situation is indicated in her coded private correspondence with friends, and she seems to have lived in perpetual flight for years - and even once underground she rejected the rigidity the Communist Party; she had been due to leave the safehouse where she lived with three other women (to set out on her own), the day after the house was raided by the police (the film suggests that this timing may not have been entirely coincidental). She was the only one of the four sentenced to death, her letters proving incendiary in the eyes of the authorities. Through Jornet's own words (copies of her letters are seen on screen and read as a voiceover) and a series of photographs (including several group shots taken inside the prison), Carolina Astudillo manages to fleetingly reconstruct a woman who was forced into absence, and seemingly long forgotten.

África 815

    Flight also occurs in África 815 - Pilar Monsell's father, Manuel, made a bid for freedom via enlistment in 1964, leaving Madrid and heading to the exotic Saharan Spanish colony to carry out his military service. Reading aloud from her father's diaries (which he has since reconfigured as a three-volume memoir) and looking at his photo archive, Monsell compassionately explores her father's hidden life. Black and white stills change to moving colour images in conjunction with the collapse of Manuel's attempts at self denial - he got married in order to have a family - and his return to Morocco in the 1980s in a hopeful (but ultimately unsuccessful) quest to find his true Prince Charming. His sadness and loneliness (as recorded in his diary) as he realises that one man after another merely sees him as an escape route to Europe is palpable even all these years later and when read at one remove by his daughter. Perhaps someone less close to the subject would have asked more probing questions (this is straightforwardly her father's story - her mother is briefly seen in holiday film footage but not mentioned), but this melancholy film was made with love and acceptance - and it also feels like the director was genuinely interested in finding out more about her father. [The film's official website]

    The sadly-defunct Blogs&Docs has been resurrected for a special issue on the films included in the festival (and their archive is well worth exploring too).

Esto no es un juego: The serious mayhem of Álex de la Iglesia

A devilish communication in El día de la bestia

   The Leeds International Film Festival 2014 has two Spanish cinema retrospectives. The first to get underway was the Berlanga and Bardem one, but this past weekend the Álex de la Iglesia retrospective began with El día de la bestia (my favourite of his films) screening to coincide with the Fanomenon Day of the Dead 8.
   Apart from El día de la bestia (1995), the retrospective is skewed towards de la Iglesia's more recent films. It's a shame that La comunidad / Common Wealth (2000) wasn't included, not least because it features Carmen Maura on top form, but the four films together capture various facets of the director's career. I have something of a mixed relationship with his films - I enjoy the dark humour, excessive mayhem, and cinematic brio, but find many of the representations of women problematic. Balada triste de trompeta is a case in point and the film manages to be both hypnotic and deeply unsettling at the same time. I think it's his most interesting film so far - if you've got the stomach for it (it's probably also his most violent film, which is saying something), it's well worth catching. I'm reviewing all four films for Take One (with an additional review of El día de la bestia for Eye for Film) and will add the links below as and when the reviews appear online.

• El día de la bestia / The Day of the Beast (1995)
• Crimen Ferpecto / Ferpect Crime (2004)
• Balada triste de trompeta / The Last Circus (2010)
• Las brujas de Zugarramurdi / Witching and Bitching (2013)

Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (Jordi Morató, 2014)

My review of Sobre la marxa - as seen at the Leeds International Film Festival last weekend - is up over at Eye for Film, here. I'll return to the film on here when I start pulling together my thoughts on the various Spanish documentaries I've been watching in the last few months.

Luis García Berlanga (1921 - 2010) and Juan Antonio Bardem (1922 - 2002)

Luis García Berlanga front left and Juan Antonio Bardem centre, on the set of Esa pareja feliz. Picture taken from the Berlanga Film Museum website

"[Spanish cinema] is politically ineffectual, socially false, intellectually poverty-stricken, aesthetically-void and industrially stunted" - Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955

"Berlanga is not a Communist, he is something much worse: he is a bad Spaniard" - Francisco Franco, allegedly (quoted in Marsh 2006: 122)  

   The 28th Leeds International Film Festival is currently offering a joint retrospective of the two directors - who trained at film school together - concentrating on the early stages of their careers (effectively their key films made during the dictatorship) but also including a few films made by later generations of directors who can be said to have cinematic links to Berlanga and Bardem - Víctor Erice's El espíritu de la colmena (1973), Carlos Saura's Cría cuervos (1976), and Pedro Almodóvar's Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984).

   Although he co-scripted Bienvenido Mr Marshall!, arguably Bardem is somewhat shortchanged by the selection of films - the absence of Calle Mayor / Main Street (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1956) seems a glaring omission. Perhaps Berlanga's films from the period have better withstood the passing of time, their sharpness not dulled one iota (I say this having seen very few of Bardem's films). But Bardem's public criticisms of the cinema made in Spain - and his political commitment (which saw him jailed during the dictatorship - he was a member of the Communist party) - are addressed and / or echoed in the form and content of films made by Erice and Saura. The surprise is perhaps how much Berlanga and Bardem got past the censors - although their films were censored, they still seem pretty blunt in their criticisms of the regime and the Establishment - although maybe the metaphorical style of Erice and Saura (with which I'm more familiar) was a case of filmmakers learning from the postwar generation and cloaking their critique in a layer of opacity (although they still had their fair share of battles with State censorship). 

   Another connection across the years is Fernando Fernán Gómez, represented here as an actor in Berlanga and Bardem's joint directorial debut Esa pareja feliz (made in 1951 but not released until 1953) and El espíritu de la colmena, but he also worked with Saura (Ana y los lobos / Ana and the Wolves (1973), Mama cumplé 100 años / Mama Turns 100 (1979), and Los zancos / The Stiltwalkers (1984)) and Almodóvar (Todo sobre mi madre / All About My Mother (1999)). He is little known beyond the Erice film in the UK, but he was a colossus of Spanish cinema (he died in 2007) with a long and varied career both in front of and behind the camera (he had 212 credits as an actor and 30 as a director (the majority of which were also written by him)) - should I ever finish the Carlos Saura Challenge (hahaha...), I wouldn't mind investigating the films he directed.

   Although his films satirise social issues and regularly skewer the Establishment (both during and after the dictatorship), Berlanga had a more complicated political background than Bardem - Berlanga's father was a Republican who was jailed after the Civil War, at which juncture the future director joined the División Azul (a volunteer regiment sent by Franco to fight alongside the Germans on the Russian Front during World War Two), but he would later officially become 'an enemy of the regime' after the gathering known as the Salamanca Conversations in 1955 (the occasion of Bardem's infamous statement at the top of this post).

   Almodóvar's films more obviously connect with those of Berlanga (although Bardem repeatedly returned to Almodóvar's favoured genre of melodrama) - while Berlanga's work often depicts a realistic social milieu, the humour taps in to Spanish traditions of costumbrismo (effectively a series of stereotypes relating to the rural and working classes, not to be taken as realistic, which took on an ironic edge from the 1950s) and esperpento (in which a distorted version of reality is utilised in order to critique it), which can also be discerned in some of the films by the man from La Mancha (and also those of the other Spanish director who has a retrospective at Leeds - Álex de la Iglesia (who I will write about next week)).

   Both Berlanga and Bardem had long careers - the former directed his last feature in 1999, the latter in 1998 - so there are plenty more of their films to explore if the retrospective piques your interest.

I will add links to the respective reviews of the films listed below as and when they go online.

• Esa pareja feliz / That Happy Couple (Luis García Berlanga & Juan Antonio Bardem, 1953)
• Bienvenido Mr Marshall! / Welcome Mr Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1953)
• Muerte de un ciclista / Death of a Cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955)
• Plácido (Luis García Berlanga, 1961)
• El verdugo / The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1963)
• El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973)
• Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976)
• Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? / What Have I Done to Deserve This? (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984)

Preview: Spanish cinema at the 28th Leeds International Film Festival

El verdugo / The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1964)

   The 28th Leeds International Film Festival begins this week, running between 5th - 20th November, and an unusually high number of Spanish films are screening there.
   As I mentioned in my previous post, Sobre la marxa / The Creator of the Jungle (Jordi Morató, 2014) will be showing, but there are also two Spanish retrospectives: one combining the early films of Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem with a few of their cinematic descendants (with films by Víctor Erice, Carlos Saura, and Pedro Almodóvar), and the other featuring the mayhem of Álex de la Iglesia (playing as part of the Fanomenon strand). Full details of screening times for all of the Spanish films can be found here.
   I'll be reviewing the Spanish films - and others - for Eye for Film and Take One. My intention is to put up a post here for each of the two retrospectives with a brief overview and collate the links to the relevant reviews. Sobre la marxa will get its own post because it fits with my current documentary focus, and the screening of Cría cuervos / Raise Ravens means that the Carlos Saura Challenge will restart (as I'll be reviewing the film as well, that extended post may not appear until the week after the festival).

Visual XIV Cine Novísimo at Márgenes (1 - 10th November)

Cenizas (Carlos Balbuena, 2013)

Until 10th November, Márgenes is hosting 7 of the films from the official selection of the 14th edition of the festival VISUAL Cine Novísimo (which ran between 18th to 24th October). The festival has always focussed on newer talents, but since 2012 has concentrated on óperas primas (directorial debuts). This year two films shared the Best Film prize: Slimane (José A. Alayón, 2013) - which is among the films available at Márgenes - and Sobre la marxa / Creator of the Jungle (Jordi Morató, 2014), which I'll be seeing at the Leeds Film Festival in just over a week.
The seven films (which include fiction and documentary) available to view for free are:

• Cenizas (Carlos Balbuena, 2013)
• Gabor (Sebastián Alfie, 2013)
• Hotel Nueva Isla (Irene Gutiérrez, 2014)
• La casa de meu pere (Francina Verdés, 2014)
• Punto de partida (Sandra Rodríguez, 2013)
• Slimane (José A. Alayón, 2013)
• Temporal (Catxo, 2012)

The only one I've seen so far (just this evening) is Cenizas. Produced by Pere Portabella's 59Films, it is a starkly beautiful (the crisp black and white cinematography by Carlos Balbuena and Marta Ayuso is stunning) and almost wordless film, which follows a man as he returns to his home town (seemingly after a death in the family - the film opens with a funeral) and explores the surrounding landscapes. The gear shift about 8 minutes from the end didn't entirely work for me (although seeing Portabella's name in the credits contextualised it somewhat), but I'll be interested to see what Balbuena does next because he definitely has an eye for framing strong visual compositions.

En tierra extraña / In a Foreign Land (Icíar Bollaín, 2014)

This post has been moved to my new blog - you can find it here.




Trailer IN A FOREIGN LAND by Iciar Bollain from Turanga Films on Vimeo.

Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival, 8th-12th October 2014

En tierra extraña / In a Foreign Land (Icíar Bollaín, 2014)

   Edinburgh kicked off its inaugural Spanish Film Festival today with the UK premiere of Icíar Bollaín's documentary - En tierra extraña / In a Foreign Land - about how Spain's financial crisis is forcing the younger generation to emigrate. The film is one of thirteen making up the varied programme - I have previously written about Una pistola en cada mano (recommended) and 15 años y un día (I've watched it so that you don't have to) - bringing a taste of Spain to Scotland.
   I will be heading to Edinburgh to watch En tierra extraña and Los ilusos / The Wishful Thinkers (the latter of which I had begun to think I would never manage to see), but also on show are the multi-award winning La herida / Wounded, the Ricardo Darín-starring (so you can't go wrong) Un cuento chino / Chinese Takeaway, and the pro-choice documentary Yo decido: el tren de la libertad / I Decide: The Train of Liberty (which if you can't get to Edinburgh, is actually available - complete with English subtitles - on Vimeo). The full list of films can be found on the festival's website.

UPDATE (15/10/14): I have written a review of En tierra extraña - which was great - for Eye for Film and once that is up I'll post an extended version of it on here. I'll also be writing something about the elusive Los ilusos for here - I had mixed feelings about it (it's maybe a bit too clever for its own good), but there is plenty going on and I'm glad that I finally got the chance to see it. The festival was by all accounts a great success, so I'm hoping that there will be future editions.

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.

Ficció / Fiction (Cesc Gay, 2006)

Cesc Gay's Ficció is one of my favourite films (in any language), but I've never written about it on here because I haven't rewatched it in the time the blog has been running. However, it is showing as part of the Camera Catalonia strand at the forthcoming Cambridge Film Festival (28th August - 7th September), and I've reviewed it (here) for Take One as part of their coverage of the festival.