Carles Santos

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.

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.

Film divided into three parts in which the Valencian musician Carles Santos explores various sonorities, using the image as a means of expression.

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 resound rather than progress by unusual links, with dejá vu scenes that promise us more but remain tensely unfinished. Jonathan Rosembaun said: “few directors since Resnais have played so ruthlessly with the unconscious narrative expectations to bug us”. Learning from the feeling of strangeness caused by Rossellini as he threw well known actors into savage scenery in southern Europe. Portabella makes Christopher Lee wander around a dream-like Barcelona. Without a doubt Portabella’s most structurally complex and most profoundly political film, that is ferociously poetic.

Super-8 film by Catalan-Venezuelan artist Mariaelena Roqué.

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.

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 secretly baptized.