Edificio España / The Building (Víctor Moreno, 2013)

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

Change of (twitter) address

You may have noticed that there has not been much activity on the @Spanishcineblog account lately - or that the sidebar on the left hand side now mentions two twitter accounts. I'm in the process of phasing out @Spanishcineblog and have deliberately not been tweeting much in the past month. I think twitter should be about interacting, and I don't interact that much through the blog's account anymore, for a variety of reasons but mainly because I am not logged in there often enough. I'm going to leave the account open for a while longer but will close it sooner or later.

The other account predates my starting Nobody Knows Anybody and it is the one I tweet from on a daily basis - it is my personal account, so it's not solely Spanish cinema-focussed (although I do tweet about Spanish cinema quite a lot). I won't be wholesale following all of the accounts that @Spanishcineblog does because that would unbalance my timeline but I am considerably chattier as @bookworm1979, so if you follow @Spanishcineblog or we've discussed films on there in the past, please feel free to say hi and I'll follow you back from there.

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.

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.

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.

Plan of Action: Documentaries and Blurred Borders

   It has been my intention in the last couple of months (I've kept getting waylaid by other things, as is my habit) to start imposing some kind of order on to my 2014 project ('El otro cine español'). The filmmakers who are being labelled with that tag are a disparate and unwieldy bunch - while I'm trying to work out who I would classify as belonging to this 'movement' (and how I will define 'it', and my own classifications) it seems sensible to divide them up into more manageable groups, even if I later draw the lines in different places.
    As I've previously said, I have some qualms with Caimán Cuaderno de Cine's criteria for their list. The actual articles they've published on the theme are more inclusive (so, even more filmmakers are mentioned, but that makes more sense to me - i.e. there is a thread that can be followed further back than CdC's arbitrary (to me) one year period). I've been reading my way through the articles and making translated notes (it would appear that the only way information will stick in my mind is in English), or in the case of Carlos Losilla's key article ('Un impulso colectivo', Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, September 2013, pp.6-8) I've written a full translation. As a side note, I'd like to say that the enthusiasm and excitement of the Spanish critics (in CdC but also websites such as Blogs&Docs) who have been writing about - and championing - these films (and particularly in what they've written about the newer group of filmmakers as being a group of people united by the conviction that you have to make images of the world and of ourselves with the aim of changing it and changing us (Losilla 2014: 22)) is compelling and infectious, and manages to even survive my broken up manner of translation (i.e. having to stop to look a word up in a dictionary when I'm not sure I've understood something properly). I've still got articles to work my way through, but I now have a better idea of the key themes or strands to what constitutes this 'other' cinema and also a view on which filmmakers I think need to be added to my considerations.
    I've come to the conclusion that documentaries are where I need to start - because of the number of documentaries being made by these filmmakers (and there are a lot of filmmakers who switch back and forth between making documentaries and making fiction films, which seems unusual to me because I can't think of many examples of this happening extensively elsewhere - Werner Herzog is one of the few names who springs to mind but please feel free to inform me of others), the manner in which documentaries more obviously fit with the apparent impetus and intentions of this 'movement' (I'm not 100% clear on this aspect at the moment, but that's my instinct), and also because it is some (but not all) of the more straightforwardly 'fictional' filmmakers (they make more or less exclusively fiction features - I'm not suggesting that they themselves are fictional, although that would make for an interesting digression) who I have more difficulty seeing quite how they fit into the larger collective. I've said 'straightforwardly' fictional because there are also a group of films that blur the borders between documentary and fiction - for example, in La plaga (Neus Ballús, 2013) the characters are local people playing fictionalised versions of themselves - and I'm going to include those films with the documentaries, at least in this initial period of research. So I need to do some reading on documentaries generally, but also look at documentary traditions within Spain as well.
    That almost inevitably means looking at filmmakers who date back to earlier periods but I don't want to get bogged down in the past too much, so I'm restricting myself to two antecedents for the time being - Joaquim Jordá (because he is frequently referred to in relation to this contemporary 'other' cinema) and Pere Portabella (because his films are clearly 'other', his filmography includes documentaries (some of them - particularly the political documentaries - key works in Spanish cinema), and I've recently watched all of them - rule no.4: always include something on your 'to do' list that you have already done, so that you can cross it off straight away). At this stage I'm not intending to write about either of them - I just want to watch as many of their films as I can get hold of, so that I have a better idea of connections Spanish critics might be seeing. It may be that as I read more, I come across more names or films that I'd like to see - but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that it's the people working now who I'm wanting to investigate and write about.
    Who makes the first cut? Again, I'm sure that more names will occur to me - or cross my radar - once I get going, but I think that Jose Luis Guerin (not on CdC's list) and Isaki Lacuesta (on CdC's list) both have to be on my list without question. The two of them move back and forth between documentary and fiction (or blur the borders in an individual film) and they've also got established careers, so there is a trail to be followed and they possibly act as a bridge between cinematic past and present (again, that's just my instinct at the moment). The other filmmakers I'm intending to look at initially are mainly people who are on CdC's list (with a few additional ones who have already crossed my path), most of whom have fairly short filmographies, but inclusion (or not) will partly depend on whether I can get hold of / view their films. It is about the films, after all. Documentaries actually seem to be easier to track down than some of the fiction films (another reason to start with them), so I do have access in some form or other to the majority of films in my initial selection (see the notes in the image above).
    That's where I'm starting - I don't know how frequently I will write about the films on here, but I will continue to at least give an indication of what I've been watching. I'm doing general reading at the moment and then I'm intending to spend some time just watching the films, before doing some more specific research. I'm taking notes when I view things already, so I may write them up in brief batches or something - but I'm not setting a schedule for including stuff on here, and in terms of my overall schedule for the project, I need a better idea of what I'm dealing with before I start setting myself deadlines. To be continued...