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Art a Catalunya

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.

In the same boat

A documentary about the technological progress responsibility in employment destruction, analyzed by philosopher Zygmunt Bauman and others.

Viridiana

Viridiana is preparing to start her life as a nun when she is sent, somewhat unwillingly, to visit her aging uncle, Don Jaime. He supports her; but the two have met only once. Jaime thinks Viridiana resembles his dead wife. Viridiana has secretly despised this man all her life and finds her worst fears proven when Jaime grows determined to seduce his pure niece. Viridiana becomes undone as her uncle upends the plans she had made to join the convent.

The Moment of Truth

Miguel, a poor young man living in Franco's Spain becomes a bull fighter to escape starvation.

The Silence Before Bach

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.

The Wheelchair

Don Anselmo, a retired old man, decides to buy a motorized disabled stroller since all his pensioner friends own one. His family strongly refuses him to purchase the vehicle, so don Anselmo decides to take extreme measures to achieve his goal…

Train of Shadows

Experimental silent homage to the origins of cinema, recreating the apparent disappearance of a French photographer in the 1920s.

Spain Again

David (Mark Stevens) 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 (Manuela Vargas) 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 .

The National Prizes

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.

Vampir Cuadecuc

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.

Umbracle

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.

The Dinner

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.

Nocturne 29

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

Marquis de Sade: Justine

Without a family, penniless and separated from her sister, a beautiful chaste woman will have to cope with an endless parade of villains, perverts and degenerates who will claim not only her treasured virtue but also her life.

Warsaw Bridge

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 synthesis of the plot of his book. They will simply have to read it.

Mudanza

"Mudanza" (Removal) came to be made after the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist was asked for involvement in a project in the Huerta de San Vicente, the home and museum of the García-Lorca family in Granada. The film records the removal of furniture and objects from the building, leaving visitors able to move freely amongst its empty spaces and a silence charged with feeling and resonance and the take from the experience whatever they demand from it - thus making poet Federico García Lorca's emotive and historic absence even more powerful, evident and heartfelt.