Email a FriendShare on Facebook

Nine Letters to Bertha (Nueve Cartas a Berta)

Basilio Martín Patino
Spain / 1965 / 95 mins. / Spanish with English subtitles

A student’s correspondence with the daughter of a Spanish exile. Narrated via letters written by Lorenzo, a student who met the daughter of a Spanish exile in England the previous summer, the film bears witness to the unease of a 60s generation in a fascist Spain that lives in the past and does not want to let it go. Patino’s first full-length film, showing glimmers of optimism about a Spain shifting towards modernity, does not follow a linear structure, but instead reinstates cinema’s capacity to pull together images according to the laws of emotion, as in dream or memory.

Martin Patino studied philosophy and arts but also attended to a School of Cinema. His first film was Nine letters to Bertha (Nueve cartas a Berta,1967), one of the most important films of the New Spanish Cinema. The film Songs for a post war (Canciones para despues de una Guerra, 1971) which reconstructs Spain from 1939 until 1953 forbidden visual and musical documents until the death of Franco.He's done excellent works on the fake documentary category, developing the possibilities of the medium. His interest on ancient and modern film technologies has got him involved on a huge collection of magic lanterns and zootropes.