Spain

Louis XIV is no newcomer to Albert Serra’s filmography, the hero of his latest opus to date, THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016). ROI SOLEIL features a twin, even though, in the game of differences, it turns out that there are quite a few. Instead of Jean-Pierre Léaud, a non-professionnal actor whom Serra already worked with in his first films.Read More »

Synopsis :
A freak accident brings together a critically ill mathematician, a grieving mother (Watts) and a born-again ex-con.

Plot Summary :
This is the story of three gentle persons: Paul Rivers an ailing mathematician lovelessly married to an English émigré, Christina Peck, an upper-middle-class suburban housewife, happily married and mother of two little girls, and Jack Jordan, an ex-convict who has found in his Christian faith the strength to raise a family. They will be brought together by a terrible accident that will change their lives. By the final frame, none of them will be the same as they will learn harsh truths about love, faith, courage, desire and guilt, and how chance can change our worlds irretrievably, forever.(imdb)Read More »

Synopsis
‘An elderly couple in Madrid each buy a pet bird. Weirdness abounds.’
– IMDbRead More »

A small rural Spanish village of the present is haunted by vampires. Dr.Dora Maeterlick is called to a nearby castle to cure the father of Baron Carl von Rysselbert who suffers from a strange blood disease. Erika, assistant to Doctor, falls in love with Carl. But Carl is a vampire and pretty soon he makes Erika his vampire bride. From now on Dr.Maeterlick plunges into a nightmarish whirl of dark happenings…Read More »

What is waking? What is dream? What is reality? What is fantasy? What is sanity? What is madness?

Such questions pervade “Open Your Eyes,” a psychological thriller directed by Alejandro Amenabar. “Open Your Eyes,” which darts among such relative novelties as virtual reality and cryogenics, is at bottom a retelling of the story of Job for a vain, materialistic, selfish age.

Handsomely filmed in Madrid with an attractive cast, this Spanish feature is unlikely to satisfy those who insist on linear storytelling and pat endings. But in its deliberately vexing way, “Open Your Eyes” is a film with enough intellectual meat on its stylish bones to give more adventurous moviegoers something to chew on afterward.Read More »

An audiovisual amalgam which, carrying on from its predecessor, Histeria de España (Spain’s Hysteria), turns the Catalonia and Spain of the independence process upside down. With Kikol Grau as the film’s Chief Minister and the most irreverent voices from the native landscape (Carlo Padial, María Cañas, etc.) making mischief, it presents recent events and hysterical historic images that are blended into a cocktail that makes for a terrible hangover. It is a choral portrait that is above all ludicrous and tragic, starring figures from popular culture ranging from Alfredo Landa and Heidi, through to Pastis & Buenri, Sergio Ramos and even Top Gun.Read More »

In Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon’s Remembrance of Things to Come, a thoughtful and illuminating survey of Denis Bellon’s photo-reportage between the two world wars, the filmmakers provide a framework for the interpretation of Bellon’s artistically rendered, zeitgeist images as prescient, historical documents that, in hindsight, provide an insightful glimpse of the looming, profoundly transformative world events that would unfold at the first half of the twentieth century. However, in this subjective, often arbitrary process of contemporal assignment of the meaning of images, the intersection between logical deduction and extrapolation continues to be amorphous and untenable.Read More »

“artdaily.org” wrote:
These two filmmakers belong to the same generation, and share an aesthetic approach and sense of humour and intimacy. Their correspondence produced an epistolary exchange that employs a minimalism of gesture and motif to follow the lives of the two filmmakers for a whole year.
Letters
1. July 26, 2010 (Eimbcke)Read More »

The sublime and the mundane run hand-in-hand in Birdsong, Albert Serra’s stunningly photographed, intensely contemplative re-telling of the biblical journey of the Magi. Much of the sublimity derives from the film’s visuals, superbly tactile black-and-white images alive to the textures of the rocky landscape, which, along with the precise gradations of lighting (each scene seems shot at the one exact moment of day when its creation was possible) and the rustling of wind on the soundtrack, imbues the barren land with a richness of meaning commensurate with the Magi’s divine mission.Read More »