Fernando Arrabal

The plot revolves around a brother and sister, who are staying with their aunt and uncle. There world is forever changed when a Cambodian boy comes to stay with them until he is able to be placed with a family permanently. The trio quickly become friends and daily they venture off into the woods near their home. One day they meet a crippled man who used to be a railroad engineer. They get this man to help them restore and teach them how to drive an abandon train they discover in the woods. The trio plan to take the train to Cambodia, so Hoang their Cambodian friend can reunite with his mother.Read More »

Quote:
Based on Arrabal’s play of the same name, Car Cemetery is sort of an eighties punk rock version of the Christ story. We follow the life of a messianic figure from birth through to his death although instead of taking place in and around the Middle East it’s set in a post apocalyptic garbage dump full of rusty, broken down cars and it’s populated by various degenerates – pimps, prostitutes, and other nefarious types.Read More »

The Spanish Civil War, as experienced by the town of Villa Ramiro. The local count and his Fascist nephews ally with the rebels; the count’s son, indifferent to politics at the outset, later makes a choice; the town’s teacher, Antonio Garcia, a pacifist, tries not to take sides but to inspire the children with ideas; a beautiful eccentric woman, Vandale, brings leadership and strength to the town; dwarfs long for equality. The fictive story of Villa Ramiro is inter-cut with archival footage of the war itself. The town is near Guernica, and the local Republicans draw inspiration from its freedom tree.Read More »

At the end of the Spanish civil war, Fando, a boy of about ten, tries to make sense of war and his father’s arrest. His mother is religious, sympathetic to the Fascists; his father is accused of being a Red. Fando discovers that his mother may have aided in his father’s arrest. Sometimes we witness Fando imagining explanations for what’s going on; sometimes we see him at play, alone or with his friend Thérèse. Oedipal fantasies and a lad’s natural curiosity about sex and death mix with his search for his mother’s nature and his father’s fate. Will Fando survive the search?Read More »

Cult Epics wrote:
Civil war is an act of cannibalism. It is the rending of a nation’s own flesh, the final act in a spiral of devolution towards base subversion. It is brother vs. brother, mother vs. father. It is as psychologically traumatizing as it is physically brutal and the scars left by a civil war don’t heal clean, they arre ragged, gaping wounds that fester and bloom. In Spain, the wounds of civil war sprouted around a single tree: the Guernica Tree.Read More »