Román Gubern

A husband and wife are taken hostage on their boat.

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.

A drug has been discovered, Liberxina 90, which will erase "establishment" conditioning from the human mind. It has fallen into the hands of some diversely anarchistic revolutionaries who spend most of the film discussing how and whether to use it; should they wait for the forces of "history" to undermine society or speed things up using the drug? They are finally forced into action by the police who are, somewhat ineptly, hunting them down.

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.

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 .

Antonio, a young man with a modest job in a small town, leads a monotonous existence until he is transferred to Barcelona to work in an architecture studio. From that moment, a new life opens before his eyes. He befriends Lorenzo, one of his classmates. Lorenzo is more experienced than Antonio and shows him a new, more sophisticated life in which Antonio feels out of place. Also, Antonio falls in love with Lorenzo's sister.

The two weeks leading up to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 are dramatized from many different locations in Spain, Morocco and London.