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.

Birthday time again

    The blog's birthday always seems to catch me unawares - for some reason I remember it as starting later in the month than it did. Anyway, that's my excuse for not having a special post ready for Nobody Knows Anybody's fourth birthday. 

    So what happened in 2014? There were ups and downs, but overall it was a marked improvement on 2013.  

    In the negative column, I'm still in the same job as I was this time last year. Staff morale has continued in steady decline since the restructure in 2013 but has noticeably nosedived even further in the last six months. The smallish team (14 of us) I'm in moved to an open plan basement office (with approx. 55 people in there) in the summer and I've discovered that I don't much like spending my entire day underground with strip lighting and in such close proximity to other people that there is no middle distance to gaze into. I know that a decline in working conditions / environment seems to be being rolled out worldwide, with the Powers That Be apparently in a race to the bottom in terms of how they treat their workforce - and I know that many others have it far worse than me [plus, y'know, a job is a job *repeats ad infinitum*] - but it makes going to work more of a grind than it needs to be. In an effort to see more sky, towards the end of the year I started walking to and from work (about 3 miles) - at the moment I mainly see night sky, but I figure that if I can stick with it during the cold and dark, then the warm (ha!) and light should be a doddle.
    Anyway, it was a combination of the ongoing crappy working conditions and my being tied to home outside of working hours (a family member had multiple surgeries) during 2013 that made me determined to do more of the things I enjoy, but also to get out and about more in 2014. 
    Film festivals combined both of those things. I started off small with a daytrip to Manchester in March to catch a double bill at the 20th Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival, and I also saw several documentaries in the same month as part of the AV Festival in my home city (Newcastle). Then I found out that three of the 'otro cine español' titles I was investigating were screening at Bradford International Film Festival (April), so I headed off there (I wrote about those films for Mediático - Costa da Morte ended up being my favourite film of the year). Three days in Edinburgh (June) followed, another three in Berwick (September), a 24-hr return to Edinburgh for the inaugural Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival in October, and finally four days in Leeds (November). Although Spanish films featured at most (but not all) of those festivals, as I said in my birthday post last year I wanted to broaden the range of films I was watching, so the Spanish titles were not necessarily the main reason for attending a given festival. I'm no better at negotiating large groups of people I don't know in a festival context than I am in a conference setting, and I didn't explore places as much as I should have, but I saw some good films - many of which I might not get the chance to see anywhere else. I'll be continuing with my film-seeking travels in 2015 and will hopefully also head beyond the UK at some point this year as well.
    The other thing that I said that I wanted to do in 2014 was consider other forms / arenas of publication. That's something I'm still working on (I think I need to broaden the scope of what I write about before I approach some of the publications I've been thinking of), but I considerably upped the amount of writing I was doing last year, which was a challenge given that I work full-time but I think that my writing improved through more consistent application and effort. The much-mentioned (by me) Javier Bardem article morphed into something else entirely, but it was published as part of The Cine-Files special issue on acting. I wrote two short 'Lost Classics' pieces for The Big Picture Magazine website (the first on Entre tinieblas (Pedro Almodóvar, 1983), the second on Overlord (Stuart Cooper, 1975)) and two articles for Mediático (the already-mentioned one about the Spanish films at BIFF, and one on censorship and Spanish documentary - the latter being the piece of writing I was happiest with last year). But the main part of my new output has been reviews, primarily for Eye for Film (45 reviews) and a handful for Take One (7 reviews). Writing reviews has allowed me to write about non-Spanish films for the first time in years - and I wrote at least one review for each festival I attended (around 30 of the Eye for Film reviews are for Spanish films - mainly because I covered the London Spanish Film Festival in September (from the comfort of my own home because a lot of the films were available on DVD or VOD) and the Spanish retrospectives at Leeds - ordinarily I don't think I would see so many Spanish films on the festival circuit in one year).

    As I trundle on into the fifth year of writing this blog my plans are not much changed from those of a year ago. My 2014 project of researching this ever-mutating 'otro cine español' continues, although I am much more focused on documentaries than I was at the start, and I have also been watching a variety of (non-Spanish) documentaries for a broader context. Hopefully I'll reach a point this year where I work out exactly what the nub of what I'm going after in this research is and what shape the writing needs to take. The Carlos Saura Challenge has (finally) restarted and I'll be trying to keep momentum going with that - I need to watch at least two of them a month to be in with a hope of finishing the challenge this year, so we'll see how I go. I'll be going to more festivals and writing more reviews, but also thinking about different ways to write about both festivals and the films I see there. I'd like to learn how to make a video essay. And I think I should aim to write something in Spanish. Maybe. I've currently got a backlog of viewing unrelated to the blog, so I need to work through that during the next couple of weeks - but after that I hope to fall back into a regular pattern of writing on here too.

Corruption, Collusion, and Censorship: Ciutat Morta / Dead City (Xavier Artigas and Xapo Ortega, 2014)

Patricia Heras

    This post is more about the case that Ciutat Morta takes as its focus than about the film itself - it may be easier to revisit the documentary as a film at some point in the future when the case has stopped whirling around in my head. But after writing last year about the censorship or suppression of documentaries in Spain in relation to Rocío (Fernando Ruiz Vergara, 1980) and Edificio España (Víctor Moreno, 2013), I find myself returning to the theme in 2015, following the censored broadcast of Ciutat Morta on Catalan TV this past weekend. I didn't initially find anything written in English about the case (the censorship or the event the film is about) - but the story has appeared on The Guardian's website today. In essence, Ciutat Morta details what appears to be a gross miscarriage of justice - in fact justice has little to do with the matter - wherein a group of young people were brutalised and tortured by the police, the latter ably supported by the Barcelona judicial and political classes, and prosecuted for a crime to which there is no physical, forensic, or independent eye-witness evidence of their involvement. Corruption, collusion, and self-interest combined in a poisonous brew alongside racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in what is suggested to be a systemic pattern of behaviour within official bodies in the city.
    On the night of 4th February 2006 on the Calle de Sant Pere Més Baix in Barcelona, a Guàrdia Urbana (urban police) operation sought to evict a party (of several hundred people) from an occupied theatre. As the police approached the theatre, one agent (not wearing a helmet) was hit on the head by an object and grievously injured (he would go into a coma). Those are the only uncontested facts of the incident. Early reports (repeated by Barcelona's then-Mayor, Joan Clos, in a radio interview) suggested that the agent was hit by a plant pot that either fell or was thrown from the roof of the theatre - and video footage from that night clearly shows those on the ground shouting that things are being thrown from above and urging other officers to put helmets on. However nobody from inside the theatre was arrested. Instead the police led a baton charge against those in the street (i.e. people who could not have thrown anything from the roof) and arrested seven people - three Latin American young men (Rodrigo Lanza and Álex Cisternas from Chile, and Juan Pintos from Argentina - each of whom has either Spanish or Italian nationality), a German girl, and three Catalans (the latter four are not named within the documentary, so my assumption (which may be wrong) is that they were released fairly quickly in comparison to the other three). Two more people (Patricia Heras (who was from Madrid and had only moved to Barcelona six months earlier) and Alfredo Pestana) would be arrested later in the night after having the misfortune to cross paths with the police at the hospital where the latter had escorted the Latin Americans for treatment after an initial beating at the police station following their arrest. Xavier Artigas and Xapo Ortega's documentary tries to unpick the series of events that followed, a tangled web of violence and torture, combined with police, judicial and political obstruction.
    It may be best to start with an outline of the basic facts:

• After being arrested at the hospital, Patricia and Alfredo were put at the disposition of the Mossos d'Esquadra along with the five who had been arrested in Calle de Sant Pere Més Baix.
• Amnesty International supports the official complaint by Rodrigo, Juan, and Álex that what happened next (quite aside from the earlier brutality they had suffered) was that they were tortured by masked officers who concealed their ID numbers. Amnesty included the complaint in their 2007 report given to Barcelona City Council - their concern was that complaints against the Mossos were not being investigated.
• The first judge the defendants encountered - Carmen García Martínez - ignored the evidence of torture.
• All nine of the people arrested had European passports, but only the Latin Americans were kept in custody while awaiting trial. They were in prison for two years before the trial started, the maximum amount of time that an accused person can be held before being tried under the Spanish State. 
• The trial began in 2008. Spain has an 'investigating magistrate'-style legal system (by my understanding that role was taken by Carmen García Martínez) and jury trials seem to be quite rare - this case was heard by the Audiencia Provincial de Barcelona (effectively a panel of magistrates).
• The police changed their version of events to fit the location of the people arrested in the street - saying that the injured officer was hit by a stone thrown from street level. The forensics / medical experts said that this was incompatible with the injuries suffered by the officer - the kind of fracture he sustained could only have been caused by a large heavy object coming from above.
• If the object came from the roof and no culprit could be found - and it would be impossible to identify who threw it given the number of people on the premises that night - civil liability would be down to the owner of the building. The building in question is owned by Barcelona City Council.
• No physical evidence (plant pots or stones) was collected from the street on the night of 4th February because Barcelona's clean-up team swept up before the forensic investigation could begin. It has never been ascertained who gave the order for the clean-up crew to clear the street.
• A lot of evidence requested by the defence (specifically the opportunity to question officials who may have had access to different pieces of information relating to the chain of command and control of information) was denied. 
• The defendants were convicted on the basis of police testimony alone. No physical, forensic, or independent eye-witness evidence supported the version of events put forth by the police. 
• At each stage of the investigation and subsequent trial, the various arms of the State (police, judiciary, local politicians) backed each other up despite evidence pointing to the innocence (and severe mistreatment) of the defendants.

Rodrigo, Juan, Álex, Patricia, and Alfredo were all found guilty (despite ambulance drivers placing the latter two elsewhere in the city at the time of the incident) and given sentences ranging between 2.5 to 4.5 years (lenient given the severity of what they had been accused of). Time already served meant that Rodrigo, Juan, and Álex were released on parole. All five appealed their sentences, only for them to be upheld and the sentences lengthened, meaning that in 2010 the Latin Americans were returned to prison for an additional two years and Patricia was also jailed in October of that year (Alfredo was pardoned before entering prison). In December 2010, Patricia was put into a semi-open work release programme but was unable to settle into a routine (or, as one friend explains, to accept a social punishment she had not earned) and fell into a depression. She committed suicide on 26th April 2011 while on day release. Rodrigo was the last of the defendants to be released from prison, in December 2012.
    Given the amount of exposition required to explain all of this, and also taking the time to consider legal, personal, and sociological angles on the issues raised, a lot of talking head footage is utilised by the directors. However the film never loses sight of the human cost paid by the defendants and their loved ones, and they manage to avoid a dull back and forth (it would admittedly be difficult to make this story dull, but it could still have become a dry retelling), instead composing a complex but coherent overview of a case that has been deliberately obfuscated by powerful vested interests. One particularly effective device is a clock superimposed over the screen, showing a minute ticking by. This first appears after Rodrigo gives an account of the initial beating received at the police station (which left behind a pool of blood bigger than himself, a visual image that clearly made an impression on him because he repeats the phrase several times with the same confusion he says he felt at the time (i.e. how could the pool of blood be bigger than him?)) – he says that maybe it only lasted a minute, but it felt like eternity. The clock then ticks down a minute in silence, not just indicating the time passing but also the isolation of being completely on your own in those circumstances. The device recurs later on superimposed over footage of one of the policemen named in the official complaint working out at the gym; as the man sets about kicking and punching a full-size punch bag, barely breaking a sweat, you appreciate how much damage he could do to a human being in the same amount of time. But the heart of the film is the absent Patricia. The film fleetingly resurrects traces of her through a combination of still images and the memories of those who knew her, and she is given a voice via her poetry (read as voiceover by her former girlfriend, Silvia Villullas), but her absence is palpable nonetheless.
    It was Patricia's suicide that brought the case to the attention of Xapo Ortega (an architect) and Xavier Artigas (a sociologist) - two men who had not long met via the audiovisual commission relating to 15-M and were looking to work on local stories together. Patricia became the focal point for the protests relating to the case (known as 4-F, or #4F on twitter). As Gregorio Morán, a journalist at La Vanguardia who wrote about Patricia at the time (here and here [the latter has been translated into English]: he is one of the few local journalists to have covered the case - silence was the norm), the young woman stands out because of her sensitivity and the articulacy of her self-expression in the poetry and diaries she left behind (her personal blog - The Dead Poet - is still online, including her first person account of her arrest and subsequent treatment). She was essentially arrested because she was 'different' and her belonging to a marginal social group was manifested in her appearance (the specific thing seized on by the police was that part of her head was shaved in a chessboard pattern - she was a Cyndi Lauper fan). Rodrigo and Juan both highlight that the police statements referred to them as a type via their appearance (they labelled them 'okupa' [squatter] or 'anti-sistema' on the basis of how they were dressed) - the inference being that it was therefore fine to treat them like scum to be washed from the streets (the film gives examples of how such groups are routinely written about in the local press). But as Silvia Villullas points out, the police misread Patricia's appearance in thinking her a punk / okupa - she was actually a goth and more glamorous in how she dressed than the 'label' they put on her. Because they didn't understand her, she was 'other' and therefore not treated as a citizen. 
    As Ortega and Artigas's investigations got underway several other incidents coalesced to reveal previously hidden information. You could say that these other incidents were unrelated to 4-F except that they reveal that the behaviour of the authorities in that case was not a one-off, and in fact something more widespread and insidious was transpiring. The first piece of information was the likely identity of the author of the initial incident report (mentioned by the Mayor in a radio interview the following day) which referred to a plant pot being thrown from the roof - this report would later be denied as the narrative changed to the stone thrown at street level. Video footage relating to a drug investigation was leaked to the press in December 2009 - one of the videos shows the Guàrdia Urbana's Information Officer, Víctor Gibanel, explaining that he is responsible for the reports and risk assessments of operations that make their way to the Mayor. In the video he is accused by the investigating judge of lying, spreading false rumours, and trying to discredit this very judge - on the basis of the evidence accrued by the judge, Gibanel tells the judge that he will resign. Jesús Rodríguez, a journalist at La Directa, reveals within Ciutat Morta that out of all of the videos leaked in relation to the drug case, this was the only one not to have been made public by the press. Gibanel did not resign, or get fired, and was later promoted by the Mayor. 
    The version of Ciutat Morta broadcast for the first time on Catalan TV last Saturday night was missing the five minutes relating to Víctor Gibanel - a judge decreed that the documentary infringed Gibanel's 'right to honour' and personal privacy and ordered that the section be censored before broadcast (Gibanel is also suing Jesús Rodríguez for violating his honour, seeking damages of 45,000€). Apparently there was no announcement before the film - or indication within it - to inform viewers that it had been censored (an omission that recalls what happened in the Rocío case). Ciutat Morta has already screened at dozens of film festivals and also in Spanish cinemas (and has been available on Filmin for around a month - although that version has now also been cut) - Gibanel did not protest until the film was due to be broadcast on television in Catalonia (a broadcast that the television channel had been dragging its heels over for several months). His legal actions probably ensured a wider audience for the film than it might otherwise have had - certainly it has made his name better known - and Catalan / Spanish people on social media were (and still are) extremely vocal in highlighting the censorship (as a result it is fairly easy to find the excised five minutes online).
    The second incident was the arrest and prosecution of two police officers for the torture of another youth, as well as perjury and falsifying evidence - no Spanish or Catalan news channel reported on the overlap in accusations. Six months after Patricia's suicide, two Guàrdia Urbanas (Víctor Bayona and Bakari Samyang) were sentenced to two years and three months for seriously torturing a young man (known as Yuri J) from Trinidad and Tobago after he attempted to defend a female friend who was being sexually harassed by the off-duty officers. He was tortured in a police station for at least 3-4 hours. To justify the arrest, the officers declared Yuri a drug dealer, but they had finally picked on the wrong person: Yuri was the son of a diplomat who had enough clout to see charges brought against the two officers who could be identified. The two men are mentioned in Patricia's accounts of physical and psychological abuse, as well as named within the official complaint made by Rodrigo, Juan, and Álex - the complaint ignored by judge Carmen García Martínez. Taking the 4-F case in conjunction with the Yuri J one reveals a system beset by racism, xenophobia (Rodrigo, Juan, and Álex were berated within racial slurs during their beatings and were treated differently to the other defendants in terms of not being granted bail), and homophobia (in relation to Patricia). 
    You would think that the overlaps between the accusations of torture would be sufficient to see the 4-F case reopened (in addition, Ciutat Morta reveals that the authorities are aware of an anonymous witness who has named the person who threw the plant pot, but the latter won't come forward to make an official declaration). You would think. But that had not happened during the film's production and although noise has been growing since the broadcast at the weekend, at the time of writing the prosecution services are saying that the case will not be reopened without new evidence. (Anyone who is interested could probably keep up to speed by searching for #ciutatmorta or #4F on twitter).

The subtitled trailer for Ciutat Morta is here. The film is currently on the TV station's catch up service but if, like me, you don't speak Catalan, you might want to watch it here - with full English subtitles and uncut (for the time being). I've taken that to be a legitimate viewing platform because the film has been uploaded by one of the directors. There is also a link there to buy the DVD although they don't currently have the subtitled version available (I've asked). The interview Fotogramas has posted today with Xapo Ortega and Xavier Artigas may also be of interest.  

The Carlos Saura Challenge, Part 9: La madriguera / Honeycomb (1969)

Director: Carlos Saura
Writer: Rafael Azcona, Geraldine Chaplin, Carlos Saura
Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Per Oscarsson, Teresa del Río, Julia Peña, María Elena Flores, Emiliano Redondo.
Synopsis: Five years into their marriage, the arrival of a collection of inherited furniture puts a strain on Teresa (Chaplin) and Pedro's (Oscarsson) relationship.

Contains some spoilers from the first third of the film.

   The third of Saura's eight cinematic collaborations with Geraldine Chaplin is an odd film. Teresa (Chaplin) and Pedro (Per Oscarsson - dubbed and looking decidedly un-Spanish (in fact I've belatedly worked out that he reminds me of a permanently peeved Jon Voigt)) have been married for five years and are settled in a routine (he manages - and possibly owns - a factory, she is a lady of leisure) and a rather sterile home. The arrival of a collection of furniture from Teresa's childhood family home triggers a nightmare and subsequent sleepwalking, followed by regressive and childish behaviour. Teresa replaces their furniture (in keeping with the modern - verging on Brutalist - architecture of their house) with what has arrived (which is distinctly different in style, with dark wood and richly coloured fabrics) - the film then settles into a series of extended role play 'games' between husband and wife. 
    I didn't hear an explanation as to why Teresa was receiving the furniture now (there are no subs on the VOD, so something may have flown past me), but it seems like an inheritance. The nightmare triggered by the arrival of the furniture and childhood mementoes appears to be a recollection of being at boarding school, woken by two nuns in the middle of the night and taken to an office (I took it to be the memory of being informed of a death)...at which point Teresa sits up in bed screaming but doesn't wake up. During the subsequent sleepwalk she unpacks the first of the furniture - an armchair and a rug - and proceeds to act as if her father is sitting in the chair: she implores her father not to send her away, says that she wants to stay with him and the rest of the family, and begs him not to make her marry Pedro. Pedro - who has followed his wife during her sleepwalk - at this point sits in the chair and takes on the father's role, asking what Teresa wants to do instead of getting married ('go to college' is her reply). Later in the film when Pedro goes through some of Teresa's possessions he finds photos of her as a child (contemporaneous with her appearance in her nightmare), a child's drawing of a plane crash (with 'Mama' and 'Papa' written next to two bodies) and a funeral notice - the suggestion is that Teresa's parents died when she was a child (supported by her nightmare), but that doesn't really fit with the conversation with her father during the sleepwalk. 

    The next day Teresa has no memory of the night's events - and is visibly embarrassed when Pedro tells her some of the things she said - but becomes increasingly giggly and childish as she continues to unpack toys and mementoes (she glues her milk teeth and a keepsake loop of her infant hair onto a photo of herself as a child), and seemingly decides to use what Pedro has told her about the sleepwalk in order to force her husband to play with her (he thinks that she is sleepwalking again but the audience knows that she has deliberately woken him up). After this point the role play games blur the lines between dream and reality (the blurring of dream, performance, and reality would be something Saura would develop in much greater detail in his next film - El jardín de las delicias / The Garden of Delights (1970)) and Pedro's perception of reality is also altered. At the same time, the question of who is 'playing' whom (in the double sense of who they are actually meant to be, but also which of them is in control of the game) fluctuates. There's a caustic humour and an undercurrent of violence to many of their interactions - Pedro bites Teresa's ankle while he's pretending to be a St Bernard rescue dog (long story) but doesn't take kindly to her smacking him in the face with a mop handle as a result - and as in the later Ana y los lobos / Ana and the Wolves (1972) there is an uneasy sense of foreboding to the games.

    'Honeycomb' seems to be the title given to the film when it was released in the USA, but a literal translation of the Spanish is 'The Burrow', which makes more sense given the centrality of the house to the story - all of the scenes between Teresa and Pedro take place either inside the house (designed by Javier Carvajal and located in Somosaguas (an affluent neighbourhood in Madrid) - other examples of Carvajal's work) or in the surrounding garden. The sense of a limited and clearly defined space gives the film a theatrical feel, as do the curtains they pull across the floor-to-ceiling windows, and overall it is quite a stagey production. It also picks up the recurring motif in the Saura/Chaplin collaborations of the actress playing multiple roles or personalities (whether real or imagined) within the same film, or the idea of women performing different versions of themselves to different 'audiences' - the expressiveness of Chaplin's face (not to mention her gameness in throwing herself into various outlandish scenarios) is put to full use, but she also clearly delineates the different women she performs through gesture and body language as well. As I mentioned in relation to Peppermint frappé (1967), Chaplin's performances might be an element for me to explore in more detail at a later date - the fact that Peppermint frappé and La madriguera are often said to form a trilogy of sorts with the elusive Stress es tres-tres (1968) (unavailable in any form) makes me wonder whether she takes on multiple personalities in that one too.

    I don't know that I'd recommend La madriguera as I found the hysteria somewhat forced and Oscarsson a bit wooden (although as he was dubbed into Spanish, that may not be entirely his fault) - but it has a curiosity value given how difficult it is to get hold of (it has never been released on DVD and has appeared on VOD only in the past year).