Jaime Fernández-Cid

In 1939, Ramón was a young man, caught up in his Barcelona family's involvement on the Republic side in the brutal Spanish Civil War. He and his family fled into exile ahead of Franco's troops. Now it is many years later, and he has come back to see how his old homestead fared in the intervening years. The only person he can find who is able to remember those years clearly is his family's old butler Claudio.

Gim, an attractive advertising model, decides to face her destiny and confront a mysterious serial killer who relentlessly pursues the most beautiful women in a disturbingly empty city.

A young newlywed woman begins to have disturbing nightmares just after settling into the old mansion that has belonged to her husband's family for centuries. When her sinister dreams come true, the innocent bride is caught in a maddening maze of unspeakable horrors.

Adopted by a treacherous semi-scientific cult where extraordinary mental powers are common, extraordinary 12-year-old David begins an archetypal journey across two continents to find his destiny as Child of the Moon.

A workshop employee decides to take advantage of a long weekend to go to Torremolinos to have fun and chat up foreign tourists.

At 45, divorced, unemployed and father of two children, Franois Morot realizes that he can no longer support the society in which he lives and decides to leave everything.

Luys Forest is a writer with a Falangist political past. He lives isolated in a coastal town, writing his memoirs (actually rewriting and adapting his autobiography with the times), and brooding over his failed marriage. His sister is worried about him and decides to send her daughter Mariana to stay with him. Mariana and a seemingly mute and artistic lesbian companion come to town to shake the stable world of Luys with their free and uninhibited ways. Soon begins a game of seduction that ends up exposing the intellectual game of Luys.

A peculiar view of the history of mankind through different events and with characters who were a part of it.

They came to the Polynesian Islands, fabulous for its Polynesian pearls… its strange rites… its exotic women…

Antoñito is a bachelor who works in a cabaret as a clarinetist. He has put an advertisement in the newspaper, looking for a good and honest girl, and to which responds Rocío, who escapes from her native Córdoba to hide the embarrassment of her pregnancy. The coexistence with the naive clarinetist, who refuses the insinuations of a co-worker dedicated to prostitution, who idolizes his deceased mother and keeps as a relic the orthopedic leg of his late father, is not easy. The other men will tend their ties around Rocío, that makes way in the world of the spectacle pretending to be blind. When she can no longer conceal that she is pregnant, Antoñito decides to give his name to the fruit of sin.

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

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.