Gonzalo Suárez
With a roving camera probing the haunting and ethereal drawings by Pablo Auladell, the story of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, his Nahua interpreter Malinche and the conquest of the Aztec empire is reconstructed by romancier-director Gonzalo Suárez. Having been a law unto himself even amongst the nonconformists of the 'Escola de Barcelona', Suárez' forte as a writer and filmmaker is narratives imbued with mystery, often enough fantasy-gone-horror, but sometimes simply something strange, weird and dreamlike.
The 70th anniversary of the “Fotogramas” magazine comes in the shape of a sentimental voyage through the history of Spanish cinema thanks to a mosaic of voices represented by people who make films, those who write them and those who consume them. The documentary pays tribute to the readers of “Fotogramas” helped by the leading figures of Spanish cinema, who will read to the camera the most representative letters received at its offices in the history of the magazine.
They are the first and the last, those who imagine stories and give voice to the characters who live them. However, they never speak. But now, they emerge from the shadows of a poorly lit room and tell their secrets, their tricks, their influences; they tell their own story, that of those who face the blank page, the absolute nothingness; that of those who are the true authors, those who create and destroy entire universes. They are the screenwriters.
Many immigrants, when they arrived in Spain, thought they had found paradise, soon thwarted all their dreams of prosperity. Many of them then decided to return to their land, but not so simple. In a pension match various immigrants end up discovering that deportation is the only way to return to his country.
Gabriel, a professor of philosophy and logic of night school, which runs through marital problems, and that when he meet a new young student who suddenly disappear after she closer to the prophetic drawings of Benjamin Solari Parravicini, will be immersed in trying to understand the meaning of these drawings, embarking with his cousin Tony, a story of suspense, intrigue and drama.
All hell breaks loose when an eccentric theatrical ensemble arrives in Oviedo, Spain to stage a production of the Leopoldo Alas play -La Regenta.
A watchmaker from Soweto finds a shoebox out of which he makes an improvised camera, aligns two lenses, and by looking through them, discovers images from the past. These are from the same places that, 35 years earlier, director Gonzalo Suárez, along with his brother Carlos, made the film Aoom.
North Sudan, summer 1923. King Alfonso XIII of Spain captures an enormous African elephant, an apparently irrelevant act that, however, will be paramount to understand the Spain of 20th century; an animal from far lands that will become a symbol of the Second Spanish Republic, the communist movement and many other things; a royal hunting that marks the beginning of a bizarre story of jealousy, passion, political intrigues and taxidermy.
Ramiro Forteza is a Premier League goalkeeper whom the Civil War and the rigors of the war led to make a living visiting villages and challenging locals to mark him penalty goals. One evening he arrives to a town in Asturias and meets Manuela, a young widow with a son, who survives sewing for Ursula, Andrade's wife, the Civil Guard sergeant.
Doctor Beiral, torn apart by the internal struggle between his social persona and the dark instincts that torment him, manages to use his investigations to give life to the monster that he has long held within him.
Death never gives back what it takes. Only sometimes change one life for other
Anna Luz, a married woman, rethinks her life when she receives the visit of a stranger who claims to be her neighbor from the floor below. His arrival coincides with the entry of a series of extravagant characters who, as in a dream, invade his house. Ana is then immersed in this succession of strange and wonderful events that will forever ruin what until then was a normal life.
While the last remnants of the Empire are extinguishing and King Philip II (1559-1598) is dying in the shadow of lost splendor, a man, defying the divine and human justice, turns his passions into fate and his will into law. His fame is as great as his pride. His conviction, eternal. His name, a legend: Don Juan. Free adaptation of "Don Juan" by Moliere.
In the summer of 1816, Percy Shelley, his mistress Mary, and her stepsister Claire visit Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. Byron challenges each to write a horror story, and Mary begins her novel, Frankenstein. She imagines the monster becoming real, and for the next six years, as tragedy befalls those around her, she believes the personification of her imagination is the cause. Against this backdrop, Claire has Byron's baby then is estranged from him and barred from her daughter. Byron and Percy continue their friendship, the one self-centered and decadent, the other wildly idealistic. The Shelleys take up residence near Pisa.
Set in a crumbling Spanish mansion, this gloriously comic and gothic story follows the fortunes of an innocent young priest as he enters a world of moral decadence, sexual intrigue and corruption of an aristocratic family in nineteenth-century Galicia.
A henpecked housewife ekes out a meager existence, surrounded by a host of colorful characters: her ungrateful husband, her delinquent sons, her headstrong mother-in-law, and her sex worker neighbor, among others.
The film tells the story of two writers in love with the same woman. For years, they have worked together. One day they separate. Ten years later and Ditirambo meets up with Rocabruno, at the very least to tell him his latest story. An epilogue that closes what they together have opened.
Chicken, a desperate hippie junkie living in a small Spanish village, is finding it difficult to separate fantasy and reality. This isn't helped by the villagers practising magic and child sacrifice, or his involvement with a group of boozy expatriates lost in their own dreams and regrets.
Ursula Alejandra Nicholson, the Carrot Queen, an extravagant American millionaire, arrives in Spain. J.J., a suave and ambitious executive, decides to become involved in the American carrot industry. To do so, he will take advantage of an unhappy bookseller, pulling him into a delirious misadventure that serves as a political satire.
A child is witness to an assault on a monk by the gang of Lorenzo the Fifth. The monk escapes and takes refuge in the estate of Doña Carlota, a countess who lives with her son Juan and daughter Beatriz. Basilisa, the maid, conjures the devil to free her son from an irreversible illness, but to do so the evil must be transmitted to an innocent soul, and for that she chooses Beatriz. The child begins to be the victim of a possession, for which everyone blames the monk.
A young woman just released from a mental institution returns home to her mansion and faces a new set of horrors.
Newlyweds have decided to spend the honeymoon in the middle of a forest and sheltered in a caravan. Relations between the two start to get confused, especially when she begins to obsess over a nearby house and with eyes that seem to spy on her with lust.
On an island buffeted by storms, the seamen are confined with no desire to abandon the life by the sea. They spend days and nights drunk in the tavern. The young woman who serves them has one desire: to go far away. This sets the stage for a musical in the open, and will frame a story of love and adventure, reminiscent of the director's film Aoom.
A publisher of novels begins to receive packets containing macabre: members of a female corpse. The appearance of a mysterious woman who seems related packages will lead to a situation of dramatic denouement.
Doctor Fausto is observed by unknown creatures in outer space. All of a sudden, a strange woman appears in his life. Her strange behavior leads his life down the path to insanity.
After seeing that Nelson kisses his lover, Barlow poisons him. But it turns out that Nelson comes back to life when he was about to be buried. From that moment, Barlow does not stop chasing him to finish his work.
Ditirambo is a wolf among wolves, fury among furies, who, in a desolate world, in a city of insanity, watches over us. Humor and logic are his weapons of choice.
In a very convoluted and intentionally in-jokey sci-fi storyline, Teresa Gimpera plays the beautiful Gim, involved in all manner of intrigue with spies, hit men, revolutionary conspirators and just crazy characters wearing goofy disguises.
A piece of silent cinema, that shows the cruel story of a young woman frightened by the apparitions of a monster of indescribable size and dangerous ordinariness.
