Anne Settimó

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.

An erotic horror tale about a vixen vampiress seducing and killing women to appease her insatiable thirst for female blood.

Erotic drama from France featuring beautiful Florence Guerin as a teenager who is switched in by a writer her mom allow us to move around in with them for the summer. The mom would love to get it on because of the writer not comprehending that he's being seduced by her child.

David is a physician who returns to Spain 30 years after his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Now a member of a medical convention, he looks up old friends and finds his former lover, now a married woman with a flamenco-dancing daughter. He and the daughter have an immediate and mutual attraction to each other. He considers running away with the exotic beauty before asking his wife to join him for an extended vacation after the convention .

Five ex-political prisoners meet secretly in a country house one afternoon in 1974 on the same day that Salvador Puig Antich is executed, to talk about their experiences in prison.

The film was conmissioned by the Galeria Maeght to commemorate the Joan Miró exhibit organized by the French Minsitry of Cultural Affairs in the Grand Palais in Paris that opened on May 17, 1974. The film, that took five days to shoot, shows the smelting and casting process of the work known as Puertas Mallorquinas by Joan Miró. The filming team travelled to the foundry owned by the Parellada family in Llinars de Munt.

With musical accompaniment from the zarzuela 'The drum Grenadiers' by Ruperto Chapí, a pair of custodians are in the basement of the National Library of Madrid showing some canvas awarded with the National Prize for Painting between 1941 and 1969.

A man and a woman, both disappointed with their partners, meet by chance at the beginning of the night. They will spend the night together drinking red wine in Barcelona's Chinatown.

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 documentary sequences, the film constitutes a playful, painterly sequence of variations on the argument that Johann Sebastian changed the way the world hears thanks to his extraordinary ear for harmony.

Amid the craggy, dusty hills of southern France, a woman screams in the night. Gorgeous Melissa Comfort, a wealthy heiress confined to a wheelchair since birth, cries out in her nightmares, terrified of a dream that comes night after night. In this night terror, she's 10-years-old. Running from a man who may or may not be her father.

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 another, the wall that those who supported the dictatorship and those who fought it from the exile built with resentment, hatred and prejudices.

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 testimonial documentary. However, he said he would do the film if after the exhibit Joan Miró himself, with the help of the cleaning staff erased his own painting. Joan Miró accepted the idea without a doubt. The complicity between the film maker and the painter is evident in the filming.

Paco, a middle-class young man, tells his lover the shady story of his cousin Montse, a social worker.

A group of adolescents from the same school, although of different social classes, intervene between them. Oscar falls in love with Sandra until Diego seduces her and makes her pregnant...

Portabella is putting forward the second part of one of his historic works, the “General report on certain matters of interest for a public screening”, which peeked out in 1976 at the start of the political transition process after Franco’s death. This second “Report” is made in the context of a severe systemic crisis in the cultural, economic-financial, political and energy fields. Above all, it nevertheless bears witness to the way civil society is coming out of this crisis with a new prominence, consisting quite simply in ordinary people’s recovering politics.

Pere Portabella’s first work as a director starts with the following phrase: “defeated…but not conquered”. This may or should be taken as an allusion to the technical K.O. taken by Portabella from Franco’s regime during the sixties as regards his work as a producer. Through the extremely raging playthings of the words of Catalan poet Joan Brossa, Portabella attempts to dismantle the forms of advertising discourse of that time.

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 reveal the daily lives of an adulterous couple interspersed with a cryptic stream of unrelated imagery. The title of this homage to directors including Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman, and Buñuel refers to the 29 “black years” of the Franco dictatorship. — chicago.cervantes.es