A female professor, a writer, and an orchestra conductor--three characters, two couples--attend a grand literary cocktail party. The writer has just won the prize for his book "Warsaw Bridge." The winner answers the journalist's questions one after another, but he is unable to come up with a...
How does a country go from a dictatorship to a democracy? A detailed report on the political representation in the heart of the Spanish Transition, only a few months after General Franco’s death, when the sincere democratic vocation of Spanish people must effort to destroy, one heavy brick after...
An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.
Mario Gas directed this music-themed Spanish drama set in Barcelona of the mid-'80s. When famed composer Lluis Doria (Laurent Terzieff) visits a transvestite club, he learns his lifelong friend Albert Rossell (Serge Reggiani) is the house pianist. A flashback takes the tale four decades into the...
Obsessed with finding her old boyfriend, Gumer, a 25-year-old girl, is released from jail in Barcelona, one of Europe's most sought-after port cities for drug trafficking and prostitution. Charo, her best friend, tries to help her, although she is not free, since depends on her pimp "Toni". But...
This film turns on two basic axes: the inquiry into ways of cinematographic representation and a critical image of official Spain at the time of the Franco dictatorship. “Montage of attractions” and Brechtianism in strong doses. Umbracle is made up of fragments (some are archive footage) that...
Portabella’s first feature, co-scripted by poet Joan Brossa, became one of the most influential works of the Barcelona avant-garde, although like all his early films, it circulated only in an underground fashion. Eschewing dialogue, the director constructs a non-narrative story in fragments that...
Elena, a depressed young Catalan translator, discovers that David, her former lover, is living in New York with a new girlfriend, where she will travel to obsessively look for him and try to win him back.
This latest feature from the eccentrically experimental Catalan director Portabella is a beautiful, sometimes faintly bonkers celebration and contemplation of the role Bach’s music plays in the world today. Blending historical reconstruction with very loosely linked ‘dramatic’ scenes and...
Barcelona, 1983. Agustí Martorell is a left-wing lawyer, atheist and former anti-Franco fighter, who discovers that his 15-year-old daughter Esther, influenced by the optional religion classes of Mossèn Parcerisas, a progressive priest and post-councillor, has converted to Catholicism and was...
As publicity for the exhibit Miró L’altre, organized by the Colegio de Arquitectos de Catalunya in 1969, the Board commissioned Pere Portabella to film Miró painting the “poster” for the exhibit on the ground floor windows of the building. Portabella was not interested in simply filming a...
The film is divided into two antithetical segments ‒ The first is made up of a couple of fixed shots of the pianist, Carles Santos, playing Chopin's Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op.45. The second segment shows him listening to this own recording from a loudspeaker until he dons the headphones,...
Fragmentos para una historia del otro cine español
32010HD
Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated...
Naked bodies are buffeted by water accompanied by the music Il Temporale from the opera La Cenerentola and the overture to Il Barbiere di Siviglia both by Gioacchino Rossini.
Lucio is an introverted boy who spends his nights dreaming of Greta. Little by little, he begins to prefer to spend his time dreaming, escaping reality and sharing his time with Greta and a mysterious knight.
An itinerary through the great creations of Catalan art: Romanesque, Gothic, Modernist and Contemporary; with interviews to Catalan creators such as architect Ricardo Bofill, poet Pere Gimferrer, sculptor Susana Solano, and painter Antoni Tàpies.
