On an empty stretch of highway, a despondent musician named Jota (Nancho Novo) stares out into the sea, trying to gather enough courage to jump. He is distracted from his suicidal thoughts by the sight of a speeding motorcyclist (Emma Suarez) who has crashed through the railing and landed on the shore. Jota comes to […]
Tag: Spanish Cinema
Vacas, 1991
At the trenches of Biscay in 1875 during the Second Carlist War, an army sergeant named Carmelo Mendiluze (Kandido Uranga) learns from a young errand boy named Ilegorri (Ortzi Balda) that a neighbor named Manuel Iriguibel (Carmelo Gómez) from his native village has joined their exhausted battalion. Eager for news of his child’s birth, Carmelo […]
Carnival Sunday, 1945
Part Alfred Hitchcock styled mysterious intrigue and part 1930s inspired romantic comedy, Edgar Neville’s Carnival Sunday is a taut, irresistibly refined, and well crafted whodunit thriller. Set in the surreal atmosphere of the advent of Carnival Sunday, the beginning of the three day celebration that culminates with the Mardi Gras festivities (and ushers the beginning […]
Barcelona (A Map), 2007
Based on playwright Lluïsa Cunillé’s Barcelona, Map of Shadows, Ventura Pons’s richly textured nocturne, Barcelona (A Map) is an intimate and atmospheric rumination on urban architectures and shared spaces as integral projections of anonymous, emotional landscapes. Ostensibly capturing an evening in the life of an elderly couple, Rosa (Núria Espert) and her dying husband, a […]
Days of August, 2006
Marc Recha channels the spirit of Lisandro Alonso’s primitivistic, metaphoric journey of interiority in Los Muertos (a derivation made all the more transparent by an extended river exploration sequence) to a visually sublime, but soporific and tediously unoriginal effect in Days of August. Ostensibly a personal chronicle of a writer, Marc (Marc Recha) who embarks […]
Happy Parallel, 1964
Part of the Morality and Society program in the Clandestí: Forbidden Catalan Cinema Under Franco series, Enric Ripoli i Freixes and Josep Maria Ramon’s Happy Parallel emulates the familiar format of official Noticias Documentales newsreels – the only shot footages of “real life” permitted by Franco under a 1942 ban on non state-sponsored documentary filmmaking […]