It symbolizes the experience of people without any political involvement who suffered repression in Franco's Spain.
It symbolizes the experience of people without any political involvement who suffered repression in Franco's Spain.
2010-01-01
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The turbulent story of the Lagun bookstore — located in San Sebastián, in the Basque Country, Spain — is a powerful tale of courage, resistance and struggle; first against the Franco dictatorship, then against the terrorist gang ETA and its numerous and sinister acolytes.
Libertad, Enriqueta, Maricarmen and Albert evoke the years when their mothers and his aunt stayed in Les Corts jail, times of innocence, hopelessness and distress. Their childhood stories inmmerse us in a world whose main characters are memories, oblivion and the passing of time.
Donostia-San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain, 2011. Maider, a filmmaker, moves to the very same flat where pedadogist Elbira Zipitria Irastorza (1906-1982) clandestinely established the first ikastola, a Basque school, under the harsh regime of dictator Francisco Franco. Despite of her pioneering work, developed throughout thirty years, her story is not well known, so Maider, intrigued, begins to research…
In the late sixties, Spanish cinema began to produce a huge amount of horror genre films: international markets were opened, the production was continuous, a small star-system was created, as well as a solid group of specialized directors. Although foreign trends were imitated, Spanish horror offered a particular approach to sex, blood and violence. It was an extremely unusual artistic movement in Franco's Spain.
An unprejudiced portrait of Spanish folklore and a crude analysis in black and white of its intimate relationship with atavism and superstition, with violence and pain, with blood and death; a story of terror, a journey to the most sinister and ancestral Spain; the one that lived far from the most visited tourist destinations, from the economic miracle and unstoppable progress, relentlessly promoted by the Franco regime during the sixties.
The Spanish author Enrique Jardiel Poncela (1901-1952) was one of the best comedy writers of all time, a novelist and newspaper columnist, misunderstood, even censored, both by the Second Republic government and Francoism, an outsider ahead of his time; also a filmmaker and screenwriter in Hollywood, architect of a revolutionary theatrical building and scenographer, cartoonist and illustrator. An implausible genius.
The life story of Vicente Miguel Carceller (1890-1940), a Spanish editor committed to freedom who, through his weekly magazine La Traca, connected with the common people while maintaining a dangerous pulse with the powerful.
The history of how the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art of Cuenca was created. In the mid-1950s, the Spanish collector and painter Fernando Zóbel de Ayala (1924-84) becomes fascinated by the young generation of Spanish abstract artists, so he begins to collect their works to show them to the public in Toledo. Until Gustavo Torner, a young forest engineer interested in art, proposes him to visit his city, Cuenca.
This documentary, filmed clandestinely, is based on several interviews with the executioners who worked in Spain during the early 1970s, as well as families of people executed by them.
Documentary in which ten republican women remember their time in Franco's prisons. “Some put wedges in her nails; my sister-in-law has currents on her fingers and nipples; some have been raped”; “Since they hit first and then ask questions, they hit me.” “Baby, they have given us the death penalty. I told him: but, Virtudes, they will commute you!". These are some of the testimonies of ten Republican women in Franco's prisons that Tomasa Cuevas, a former member of the Communist Party, collected on an old recorder hidden in her bag so that they would not be lost in oblivion.
During the Franco regime, the prisons are filled with thousands of people with artistic ideals.
In his time of greatest splendor, the singer Miguel 'Bambino' Vargas Jiménez (1940-99) was the last frontier of flamenco, an immense musical genre that he developed and brought closer to large audiences: an artist of artists, the idol of the roadside bars, whose inimitable style, scenic magnetism and heartbreaking personality made of his figure a myth, a king without a kingdom, a giant of the popular music of the 20th century.
"El campo para el hombre" was a politically militant documentary about the small holdings of land in the north of Spain and the large estates in the south of the country. This film portrays the exploitation and misery of the Spanish peasants, but also their class-consciousness and their will to fight for their rights and freedom. The film was shot in the late years of Franco's dictatorship, so it was made in secrecy (the directors were connected to the Spanish Communist Party).
The life of Paco Martínez Soria (1902-1982), one of the most famous and beloved Spanish actors, both on stage and screen; a comedian, a theatrical producer, an idol for the masses. A celebration of the uncommon gift of making people laugh.
Spain, 1970s. A Clockwork Orange, a film considered by critics and audiences as one of the best works in the history of cinema, directed by Stanley Kubrick and released in 1971, was banned by the strict Franco government. However, the film was finally premiered, without going through censorship, during the 20th edition of the Seminci, the Valladolid Film Festival, on April 24, 1975. How was this possible?
The sarcastic account of the assassination of five Spanish politicians between 1870 and 1973 is mixed with the narration of five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by five skillful pencil artists. A documentary, a video essay, a collage, a provocative experiment where various pop culture figures and icons perform unexpected cameos. The macabre joke of a jester. Never more.
A look at the different masculinities portrayed in Spanish cinema through time. (A sequel to “Barefoot in the Kitchen,” 2013.)
A history of the Spanish Transition told in first person by the main protagonists: on the one hand, the politicians, idealistic or merely opportunistic, who brought it to a successful conclusion in the tribunes and offices; on the other hand, the citizens who, in the streets, supported it sincerely or fought it with ferocity.
A history of the political and social repression carried out by the ruthless regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco between 1936 and 1975 that focuses on the lives of gays and lesbians during those dark years and the death of the Spanish gay poet Federico García Lorca.