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ATLANTA LATINO | SEPTIMO ARTE LATINO by Irene Diaz Bazan | US | 19 september 2007 |
The series Docuspain compiles the best documentaries portraying culture and folklore in some Latino American countries.
As Linda Dubler, responsible for Media programs at the High Museum, says, this festival is different this year. "This year 12 films shows te terrific film work made in Latinoamerica, Docuspain is a proof of the rich cultural diversity of these countries.
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ABC | NEW YORK HONORS THE BEST CENSORED SPANISH FILMS by Anna Grau | Spain | 10 october 2007 |
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New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened a film series with the greatest Spanish films that sidestepped censorship during Franco’s time. American audiences step in the movie theatre feeling pityful for those who suffered the dictatorship, just to leave the screening room afterwards with certain inferiority complex: Hunger for freedom tremendously inspire creativity. Activist and subtle filmmaking is possible, unlike Michael Moore’s. (...)
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UNIVISION | SPANISH CINE OF DISSENT | US | 17 october 2007 |
New York’s Museum of Modern Art presents a Spanis film retrospective that explores the creative freedom that filmmakers working under Franco’s regime (1939-1975).
By using black comedy and a simbolic language, these filmmakers sidestepper censorship. Spain (Un)censured gathers greatly expressive films that awoke people’s conciousness despite dictatorship (...)
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HOUSTON PRESS | SHORT FILMS FROM SPAIN by Olivia Flores Alvarez | US | 18 october 2007 |
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Catch the latest in Spanish cinema at “Short Films from Spain (part 1)” and see a program that guest curator Marta Sanchez calls “really, really daring and diverse.” The Barcelona-based Sanchez mixed filmmaking styles and genres, from traditional black comedy to “Cine de Autor” to create the series. The result is a surprisingly varied look at modern Spain and its changing cultural landscape. Among Sanchez’s most ambitious selections is With What Shall I Wash It. “It is a really beautiful memorial to an era — a moment of total freedom in Spain after Franco died. It really portrays an atmosphere which was very real, and it is really poetic,” she says. “The maker and her sisters are animators. Because the film is about homosexuality and sometimes explicit, they did all the animation while hidden, and every night they would hide the materials under the bed so they weren’t discovered. The film was a real success, [winning]…more than 20 awards around the world — still her parents do not want to see the film. I think she is very brave and a great artist. She has a kind of sensitivity rare in these days.”
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HERALD TRIBUNE | BIG APPLE XOURTS FILMS DEFYING FASCISM by M. Manso de Zuñiga | US | 20 october 2007 |
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Spain (Un)Censored, an on-going film exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), showcases 20 Spanish films produced from 1951 tp 1979 that reveals the creative zest of film directors working under General Franco’s rule. Their inventiveness not only helped them defy the tight scrutiny of the regime’s censors, but also produce masterpieces laden with irony and often mockery of the very society that bred them. (...)
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THE VILLAGE VOICE | RULES, MADE TO BE BROKEN by Julia Wallace | US | 23 october 2007 |
In "Spain (Un)Censored," MoMA presents a series of 20 films made during Franco’s 35-year dictatorship, from early efforts like Furrows (1951) and Welcome, Mister Marshall! (1952), which explored rural poverty at a time when it was rarely seen or discussed, to The Cuenca Crime (1979), a graphic depiction of torture and repression made after Franco’s death, but before Spain’s full transition to democracy. All of the films in the series were created under the thumb of the Spanish censors, who restricted formal innovation and most overtly political or sexual content. Directors were forced to turn to more subtle means of getting their point across—symbolism, innuendo, and gentle irony—or risk having their work banned. (...)
(...) Victor Erice’s quiet 1973 masterpiece The Spirit of the Beehive, an obvious influence on Pan’s Labyrinth, revolutionized the genre by allowing children to speak for themselves and examining their inner lives with both decency and wonder. Its wispy plot deals with a family living on a remote Castilian plain, struggling with the after- effects of the Spanish Civil War. While their elderly father and young mother are preoccupied with other matters (beekeeping and adultery, respectively), sisters Isabel (Isabel Telleria) and Ana (a grave, astonishing young actress named Ana Torrent) are left to their own devices. After a village screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein, Ana becomes haunted by the image of the monster, which she believes she has discovered when a fugitive soldier escapes to a field near her house. In Spirit, Ana’s innocence is crushed just as thoroughly as Viridiana’s, but by the monstrosity of war and the even more monstrous peace that followed.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES | FILM SERIES SPAIN (UN)CENSORED by Kehr | US | 26 october 2007 |
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A continuing survey of the surprising diverse work produced during the Franco regime in Spain (1939-1975) continues this weekend with some important titles from the 1950s and the 1960s. Among them are Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955); Marco Ferreri’s black comedy about sexual repression and the housing shortage, The Little Flat (1958); and Luis Garcia Berlanga’s Placido, a 1961 comedy about one man’s desperate attempts to prevent the bank from seizing his motorbike as his provincial town prepares for Christmas.
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GREEN CINE DAILY | SPANISH CINEMA NOW. 5. by James Van Maanen | US | 18 december 2007 |
Spanish Cinema Now continues its mixed bag of attractions with Shortmetraje, a program of seven short subjects of unusually diverse style, subject and length. I am not a particular fan of shorts, but this combination, gathered by film curator Marta Sanchez strikes me as about as interesting a blend as you’re likely to see in any 90-minute sitting.
Libra (yes, the astrological sign) begins the program on a brief, quizzical note, as a young woman faces her questioner and explains the problem she has with taking her final law exams. In only four minutes, writer/director Carlota Coronado and her two-person cast Helena Casteñeda and José Angel Egido manage to hold us rapt and then surprise us.
At the screening I attended, an audience favorite, garnering spontaneous applause, appeared to be Lucina Gil’s fourteen-minute The Happy Man. Concerning three foreign anthropologists studying the phenomenon of happiness in Spain, this would get my vote as the clinker in the bunch due to its utterly simple-minded approach and conclusion. Our learned educators discover an elderly married man who is happy, yet - shock, shock - does not own the latest hot sports car or vacation property and is not even famous. Can Spaniards - or Americans or any Europeans - really be so dense as to imagine that some people might find happiness elsewhere? Guess so. There’s no mention, either, of the basics of life - food, shelter and so forth - being necessary to achieve this much-vaunted state of being. Produced and acted pleasantly enough, this is, I presume, the work of a very young filmmaker (...)
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TIME OUT LONDON | CENSORS AND SENSITIVITIES by Nick Funnell | UK | 09 january 2008 |
Sam Peckinpath said seeing The Hunt changed the way he made films. Carlos Saura’s 1965 movie is ostensibly about three old army buddies arguing during a weekend’s hunting outside of Madrid. Beyond that, though, it burrowed to the diseased core of Francoist society with its reworking of the expressive possibilities of on-screen violence. (...) As a season of 20 movies at BFI Southbank shows, oppositional cinema shone under Franco, with filmmakers inventing devious ways to get round the censors. (...)
With their imaginative leaps, experimental storytelling and thick atmospheres, all have a distinctly Spanish edge, the product of their half-fostered, half-repressed genesis, which remains influencial to this day. If you want to know what makes the likes of Pan’s Labyrinth’ and Almodovar so exceptional, look no further.
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DAILY BRUIN, UCLA | DEFYING THE DOCUMENTARY by Guido Pellegrini | US | 25 january 2008 |
Docuspain combines art with entertainment, marrying insightful content with a captivating time at the movie theatre.
"We can always learn something from watching films from another country," Paul Malcolm (UCLA Film and Video Archive) said. "This program shows us that we are not the only country dealing with issues of immigration, culture, war and history. It’s a chance for people to see how another nation deals with these kind of issues’. The schedule titles were also selected for the manner in which they use the documentary form, pushing the boundaries of their chosen medium to communicate emotional and intelectual effects. "By looking at these films, you will understand much better the human experience," Marta Sanchez (Pragda) said. "It’s the general human experience. It’s not just the Spanish"
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NEW YORKER | A CHANGE OF HABIT (about Spain (Un)Censored) by David Denby | US | 29 october 2008 |
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There’s nothing more joyous than discovering that a film that was shocking in one’s youth still has the power to make one cringe. Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, from 1961, is certainly not his greatest movie (...) but if you fear blasphemy and entertain any hope for the Christian redemption of the downtrodden, this is the jolt you need. (...)
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