A few men are gathered for a day’s rabbit hunting. The place looks as desolate and barren as it is possible to imagine, and the heat is obviously intense. The men have memories of this godforsaken gulch, since it was a battlefield in the Spanish Civil War. As the day goes on, the scorching sun frays the men’s nerves and sends them toward delirium, bringing out their inner weaknesses and their personal conflicts, normally concealed beneath a veneer of politeness.
Tag: SPAIN
In a town near Salamanca, an eccentric widower, aged 60, is captivated by an imp, a precocious 13 year old. Alejandro is wealthy and alone, passing time with music, chess, and his shotgun. Gregoria (Goyita) the daughter of a weak-willed policeman and his bullying wife, is a budding naturalist who conspires to meet Alejandro. Even though he knows the village is talking, Alejandro spends time with Goyita, on walks, horseback rides, and dinners. He’s enchanted and tells his friend the village priest that he’s living for the first time. Goyita makes new demands on Alejandro, and he must decide how to be true to his ethics and to this Platonic yet highly-charged relationship.
Very hard radiography of repression, torture and the unstoppable desire to achieve freedom. The untold protest drawn by OPS, with a mouth that screams in a face that has literally sewn other parts, becomes one of the most political and adult works of Spanish animation.
Captain Darman is a communist party hitman now living peacefully in exile in England where he runs a bookshop in Brighton. That is until a visitor gives him a coded message summoning him back to Spain where he’s instructed to execute a traitor. As he prepares for the hit he starts to doubt the guilt of his target as it bears similarities to a previous hit which he now thinks was innocent.
A bankrupt tenor wants to bolster his finances by reuniting with the two former singing partners who sued him 10 years earlier.
Mariano suffers a car accident in a marijuana plantation that is being incinerated by the Civil Guard. In a semi-unconscious and intoxicated state of cannabis he suffers a hallucination in which he thinks he has seen the virgin. People believe him and thanks to the care of a nun and the services of Toni Towers, a horny showman and promoter of half-hair shows, Mariano becomes, from night to morning, an illuminated sanctuary.
As in the novel of the same title from Camilo Jose Cela, “La Colmena” is a sad composition with the stories of many people in the Madrid of 1942, just the postwar of the Spanish civil war. The main theme of the film is the contrast between the poets, surviving close to misery under the Franco’s regime, and the winners of the war, the emerging class of the people that makes easy money with illegal business.
Pastel de Sangre is an anthology of four short films whose theme revolves around “terror throughout history” The first film “Tarot” takes place during the crusades. The second, “Nineteenth Century” is about the love triangle of Frankenstein. The third, “Terror among Christians” takes place sometime during the reign of the Roman Empire and the fourth and last, “The Dance”, is a contemporary ghost story.