Basilio Martín Patino
The film starts with the confluence of the 15M protesters in Puerta del Sol, follow the construction of the Camping Sol, a kind of parallel city assemblies, whose structure extends to neighborhoods and nearby cities and all over Spain. After what happened attest, without mediation or intention, the film lets the images speak and describe the end of the experience.
July, 1936. The terrible Spanish Civil War begins. When the streets are taken by the working class, the social revolution begins as well. The public shows are socialized, a model of production and exhibition of films, never seen before in the history of cinema, is created, where the workers are the owners and managers of the industry, through the unions.
Rodrigo returns to his childhood home of Salamanca after a four-decade absence and a career as a guerrilla in Latin America, a secret agent in the Eastern Bloc and an official for an international agency. While Rodrigo may have attempted to put his past life behind him, the memory of his now deceased mother and his old-world family returns to haunt him. In an old city dominated by the weight of tradition, Rodrigo discovers a daughter about whose existence he had never known, as well as a grand-daughter, the enigmatic and beautiful Octavia. A rebellious teenager, Octavia dismisses her grandfather's old politics, possessing her own sense of what freedom means. Patino's film is a poetic, assured contemplation on the pain of returning somewhere you never really left and the accompanying ironies of a man obsessed with history who cannot face his own.
Hans, a German director, is in Madrid to film a television production about the capital and the Civil War, 50 years after it occurred. Accompanied by Lucía, his editor, and Goyo, his cinematographer, he films shots of the modern city, searching for spaces and people related to its past. At the same time, he views materials related to the past. In this search, Hans questions the point of his project, and disagrees with his producers until he discovers a project that he is passionate about.
This literary film is imbued with the disenchantment of Spanish exiles who left their homes to protest Franco's fascist regime and then returned after its demise to find that democracy had not instilled either ethics or deep motivation in government leaders. Director Basilio Martin Patino presents his story, and a large part of the film is based on his own life, through the experiences of an exiled heroine played by Charo Lopez. She has returned to Spain to look for meaning in her life, something that she never found living in Germany, not even after having a child. She is also in the process of translating the German lyric poet Friederich Holderlin (see the 1985 Halfte Des Lebens) into Spanish, focusing on his epic Hyperion. Excerpts from the translation are voiced over throughout the film. As she looks up old friends from many, many years ago, even those who have achieved worldly success are suffering from the same ennui that propelled her back home.
This documentary, filmed clandestinely, is based on several interviews with the executioners who worked in Spain during the early 1970s, as well as families of people executed by them.
Caudillo is a documentary film by Spanish film director Basilio Martín Patino. It follows the military and political career of Francisco Franco and the most important moments of the Spanish Civil War. It uses footage from both sides of the war, music from the period and voice-over testimonies of various people.
This is a masterpiece of found footage and archival cinema largely ignored. Using vast collections of photographs and family films acquired in the flea markets and to expatriates, combined with images produced by mass media and Franco official regime, this film traces the history of the people of Spain from civil war to the raising mass culture and consumption in the '70s. The "particularity" is that all the chapters are distinguished among them by a popular song, related with the content shown, with deals with the invented and surrealistic world invented by people to survive in starvation, repression and lack of freedom. This strategy takes that to the origins of cinema, to the cabaret, and to cinema as a colective party in the theater.
María belongs to the upper bourgeoisie and has always had everything in life, even a brilliant, educated husband; in short, an intellectual to presume. Alejandro, on the other hand, has been going up day by day, he has grown up with his work, believing in himself -he is an economist- he has fought with all his strength to achieve a higher social level and he has succeeded. He is a professor in the University, executive of a great company, owner, in short, of a beautiful villa in the outskirts. But he is, nevertheless, in the critical age, in the age of taking stock of his past, of justifying himself. And the truth is that, despite his material triumph, he is not happy, there is no reason to be in his participation in society, he is not satisfied with anything. It is, in a word, a step away from his inner failure. In this situation he discovers, in turn, that María accuses him of having dedicated more time to succeed than to love her.
A travelogue through the diverse neighborhoods of Madrid, its picturesque streets and its history; and an approach, with a sense of humor, to the lighted signs and advertising slogans of the shops: an unusual portrait of the city and its people.
Lorenzo is a young man who has just returned to Salamanca (Spain) from England, where he fell in love with Berta, a girl daughter of exiled parents who have never seen Spain. Lorenzo tries through some beautiful letters that she understands how is the world where her parents once lived.
This short film "Torerillos 61" is one of the first works of the master Patino, which tries to portray the Spanish society of the time outside the state convention and dodging the hand of censorship. Social commitment is the brand director throughout his long career, starting with short films such as this one, made in the early sixties, in the wake of the statements in Talks Salamanca. The sadness off the characters portrayed is bleak, "Maletillas" (aspiring bullfighters) in search of luck to pull them out of poverty. (IMDb)
An account of the journey that King Alfonso XIII of Spain made to the impoverished shire of Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in the region of Extremadura, in 1922.
