Spain

Quote:
Dreams of fame take Diana from Madrid to Hollywood. She seems to be on the right path when a powerful agent notices her, but he only wants someone for a sham marriage with a secretly gay star.Read More »

Quote:
A brother and sister live together in a relationship which is unhealthily close, and has overtones of incest. The unpleasant couple are involved in other deranged and disgusting activities as well, including feeding raw meat (possibly from live puppies) to their pet poodle.Read More »

Synopsis:
A village on the border between Galicia and Portugal, hidden deep in the woods, a world out of time. Documentary moments of everyday life stand alongside dramatized scenes acted by the villagers working in the fields, sitting in the pub, singing traditional songs in the local dialect and telling old tales. Scenes of their own lives are interwoven with quotes from the play „O bosque” (The Woods) by the Galician writer Marinhas del Valle, a parable about the Franco dictatorship. When a fire breaks out in the woods, there are growing signs of an impending apocalypse. Arraianos is a film about remembering and the disappearance of a way of life.Read More »

Quote:
The singer Marta Velez decides to retire to make-up her marriage. Her husband, a vividor, tries to cheat her a large sum of money. Unable to get it, he thinks of a plan to kidnap his daughter and that the mother pay a ransom.Read More »

Sara, the daughter of Oliver and Julia suddenly disappears. Days pass by without any news about the girl. But one morning, the family receives a letter from someone who claims to have retained Sara and wants to talk with them that night.Read More »

As 1973 winds down, Franco is still governing Spain with an iron hand. Opposition parties are forbidden; labor movements are repressed; and Basque nationalists are mercilessly hunted down. The caudillo [dictator] is aging, though, and the continuity of the régime is in question. One man has the trust of Franco, enough authority and experience to assume the leadership, and an impeccable track record as to dealing with enemies of the State: Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. For the embattled, clandestine Basque organization ETA, Carrero Blanco must be brought down. Daring plans are made, requiring a meticulous execution…
— Eduardo Casais, IMDbRead More »

On the day of his birthday, Santiago (Juan Luiz Galiardo) hires a team of actors and actresses to play as if they were members of his family. Along the day, the personality and sentiments of each member of his fake family is disclosed to the viewer, showing their true feelings. This weird and surrealistic story is a great metaphor with the real society. In a simple way, it can be understood as a powerful and lonely man, who somehow misses his family and hires a group of actors and actresses to perform, on the day of his birthday, as if they were his lost family, as a kind of weird celebration. This type of interpretation leads the viewer to a great review of the hypocrisy of the institution `family’. Read More »

Quote:
Director Javier Rebollo’s first feature, Lola (Lo que se de Lola), was the unanimous choice of this year’s London Film Festival FIPRESCI jury. Partly shot in French and in Spanish, and located in both France and Spain, it is a visually provocative tale of a conventional loner who becomes a silent voyeur obsessed by desire and an impossible love.Read More »

Matt Zoller Seitz (The New York Times) wrote:
Elmore Leonard once said that the key to telling an exciting story was leaving out the parts that people skip. The “Don Quixote” adaptation “Quxiotic/Honor de Cavalleria” is composed of little else.

In adapting Miguel de Cervantes’s novel about the senile would-be knight, Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó), and his sidekick, Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), the film’s writer and director, Albert Serra, favors landscape imagery and natural sounds over dialogue and music.Read More »