Email a FriendShare on Facebook

The Damned (Los condenados)

Isaki Lacuesta
Spain / 2009 / 104 min. / Spanish

Two ex-guerrillas reunite at an illegal excavation site to look for the body of a third colleague who disappeared 30 years ago. But they are no longer the same people they used to be. The tension builds and secrets kept for so long gradually come to light as they progress in the search for their friend. Enfant-terrible and multidisciplinar artist Isaki Lacuesta, author of one of the recent masterpieces of Spanish cinema, La leyenda del tiempo, always pays attentive to the mutual intoxications between reality and fiction, between fact and myth. Thought-provoking, always inspiring thriller, the film is about whether or not it’s best to remain quiet about the past.

The two first films of Isaki Lacuesta, Cravan vs. Cravan and La leyenda del tiempo, are two of the most multiawarded Spanish documentaries of the last years. In addition to being a director, scriptwriter and camera operator, Lacuesta has also combined his participation in numerous exhibitions with contributing works to the written media such as La Vanguardia or El Periódico, and teaching. He is currently a professor of audiovisual arts at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and teaches a documentary course at the CECC of Barcelona. He has also been a professor/producer in the Master’s in Creative Documentary Filmmaking programme at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (IDEC), a professor in the Master’s in Creative Documentary Filmmaking at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, and a professor of documentary cinema at the University of Málaga as well as taking part in many other cinema classes and conferences.