Iñaki Arteta, the director of the documentary Trece entre mil, wrote a letter to the media this week asking them to put the word out about his film, which was in danger of being pulled from cinema screens after only a week. It wasn't vanity: it was that he genuinely believes his film is important, because it basically features interviews with the families of thirteen victims of Basque terrorism, ranging from children to politicians. It is thought-provoking, highly-charged, and moving, and if you're in any position to see it, rather than say Chicken Little, over the next few days, then take the opportunity. There's a lengthy section devoted to it a this site (in Spanish).

Interviewees, some more articulate than others, include the families of Jesus Ulayar, the mayor of a small town, on the site of whose death trash cans now stand; chauffeur Francisco Maranon, now elderly and wheelchair-bound, who refers to himself as “a piece of meat with eyes” (pictured above); two widows of politicians between whom a friendship has developed since their husbands’ deaths (a rare upbeat moment); Antonio Moreno, who describes how his daughter literally fell apart in his arms as he tried to rescue her from his bombed car; and the brother of politician Ramon Baglietto, astonishingly killed by a man whom Baglietto had saved, as a baby, from being run over eighteen years before.

"Streets are longer at night than by day."

A spot of glamour today: Pedro Almodóvar’s press conference for Volver at the Casa de América, featuring plenty of bouncy, well-shampooed hair. There’s a marketing trick nowadays which means press conferences are given for films that haven't even started shooting yet (this one does on 18th July). Sometimes, as when the director is a complete unknown - not the case today - this is just embarrassing. The aim, presumably, is to flood the media (PdS Blog, for example) with your name and kill the last shred of any spontaneous interaction between movie and viewer – I’m pretty sure I’ll have “seen” Volver, in the sense that I’ll know pretty much everything there is to know about it, before I see it. In this case, not even all the actors in the film have been decided yet. Foreign journos had been flown in, but there wasn't much in the way of news. PA, flanked by Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura (with whom he famously fell out 17 years ago, and the Spanish media are desperately trying to get mileage out of the fact that they’re working again) gave good value, talking for one and a half hours about the new film, which sounds part nostalgia trip, part study of death, part homage to his mother and part homage to the Castilian village of his birth (his rural provenance becomes increasingly apparent in his features the older he gets). Carefully he did not give too much away about the film, but I suspect that he’s such a chatterbox he actually has given everything away and is just telling us he hasn’t. When asked what the film was about, he said it was hard to say, because he hasn’t made it yet. He winsomely confessed that he usually adjusts his comments about the subject-matter of his films to conform, after the fact, to the film he’s made. In other words, he doesn't know what he's done till he's done it. This may be true of much wonderful art, but, if it's true (it provoked Round of Applause No. 1), then it might explain why his films feel (to me at least) to have a hollow center. They can feel disparate and unfocussed. Round of Applause No. 2 came, predictably, when he mentioned today’s ruling to legalize gay marriage in Spain.

Anyway, some PA gems from the conference. This kind of stuff means the guy has the Spanish press wrapped round his little finger.

Q: “Could you tell us about the role in men in your new film?” A: “To be brief, there aren’t any.”
“Society is always one step ahead of politics.”
“I have to make films in order to survive.”
“I don’t want to be a symbol. Being a symbol ties you down.”
“I don’t like being called a “gay director”. It’s like calling George Bush a “heterosexual president”.” (Round of Applause No.3.)

They're all in all our minds somewhere. The American Film Institute has published its Top 100 Movie Quotes, a fact which has provoked an El País article that inadvertently demonstrates what a difficult art translation is. No. 1, is from Lo que el viento se llevó (What the Wind Carried Away): "Francamente, querida, eso es algo que no me importa". Clunky's the word: but El País explains that a more aggressive expression which included the equivalent of "damn" would not have been appreciated by Spaniards in 1939. From the same film, "A Dios pongo por testigo de que nunca volveré a pasar hambre" (59). Marlon Brando is at Nos. 2 and 3, with "Le haré una oferta que no podrá rechazar" and "Fuiste tú, Charlie, yo podía haber sido alguién, fuiste tú..." I don't know where that "fuiste tú" came from. More: "Que la Fuerza te acompañe" (5), and possibly the least inspired one of them all at No. 8, Bogart saying "A tu salud", which is not really "Here's lookin' at you, kid", to Ingrid Bergman (you can see why that one's never been considered a classic by Spaniards - the translator's to blame). A double translation in "Tócala, Sam; toca El tiempo pasará": I'm not sure "El tiempo pasará" actually means "As time goes by". There are, of course, a couple which even the translator couldn't screw up: "Rosebud" (17) and "Bond, James Bond" (22). Shouldn't that be "Vínculo, Jaime Vínculo"? While at 76 we have a movie quote that's already in Spanish: "Hasta la vista, baby".

Outside, something extraordinary is happening. It's raining. I was starting to think it had forgotten how to.

It has just caught my eye that Pedro Almodóvar has at last won something in Spain for Bad Education. Spain has a habit of not recognizing cinematic talent when it's staring it in the face: a more recent example is the somewhat Almodóvar-ish Ramón Salazar, whose 20 centímetros, a transgendered musical, is a lot of fun but which has so far failed to make a dent in the box office Top 10. As per the Guardian article, it's not strictly true that Bad Education was "panned" in Spain: it's just that they didn't automatically call it a masterpiece, which seems to be Pedro's fate these days. Next week PdS Blog will be going to the press conference about his next film, Volver. The image above, from the diary of the shoot, shows Penélope Cruz (any excuse) and Carmen Maura reading the script. Apparently.

Here's a nice Wikipedia entry on movies that have been considered the greatest ever. (Via kottke.org).

BTW, the new Puerta del Sol is (finally) out, featuring among other things Oscar winner Alejandro Amenábar, Nobel winner Pablo Neruda, winning singer José Mercé, and TV for losers. It's the real thing. I'd like to buy the world a PdS. We're lovin' it. Etc. etc.
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These wonderfully fruity features belong to the Chilean actor Julio Jung, who stars in a fine film I've just seen, Cachimba by Silvio Caiozzi (if you can get to see anything at all by Caiozzi, I'd recommend it). Based on a novella by Chilean novelist José Donoso, it's a simple but resonant comic tale of an insignificant young bank clerk, hopelessly in love with his tubby girlfriend, who comes across an unexpected art treasure and decides he wants to try and save it. The film has about a thounsand different levels and is unlike anything else I've seen since I saw the last Caiozzi film, Coronación. I met the director briefly in San Sebastián at the time of that film, when he was being accompanied by a woman whose job is was to represent Chilean cultural interests in Spain. She was impressed by the fact that I liked Coronación, so impressed that some months later she called me and asked if I'd like to go on an expenses-paid cruise round the coast of Patagonia. Criminally, I couldn't go - and of course, although I'll never forget that I wasn't able to go on a freebie to Patagonia, I can't now remember what it was that stopped me from going. Anyway, looking for web information about Caiozzi has led me to this site, which is just the thing for any Latin American cinema buffs who don't speak Spanish.
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You could be forgiven for thinking that Spanish cinema was in decent shape.

Million Dollar Baby: Two hours of this followed by 15 minutes of this. Please don't click if you plan to see MDB.
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"The Spanish Film Academy's problem with Almodóvar is starting to look personal", wrote PdS Blog a week ago. Well, it's only dinner party chat material really, but this arrived today from the El Deseo press office: Debido a los crecientes rumores, queremos confirmar desde EL DESEO que tanto Agustín como Pedro Almodóvar solicitaron su baja definitiva de la Academia de las Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas de España a finales de diciembre de 2004. (Pedro and his producer brother Agustín have resigned from the Academy.) El motivo fundamental es el desacuerdo con el sistema de votación, así como otros aspectos que rigen el funcionamiento de la Academia, tales como la falta de información en cuanto a número de participantes en las distintas votaciones. (Because they don't agree with the Academy's voting system and "other aspects" of the way the Academy is run.)

So basically Spain's greatest living film director is no longer a member of the Spanish Film Academy. Habitually snubbed by them down the years during the Goya Awards, Almodóvar didn't win anything for La mala educacíon last week - and if this latest news explains that, or if that explains this latest news, then things are in a sorry state indeed. You heard it here first (in English, at least.)
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This old chap has just woken up in a wonderful Spanish documentary called El cielo gira by Mercedes Álvarez (spot the deliberate error in the headline in the link), which has just won a prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival. He is one of the 14 people who still lived in the village of Aldealseñor, near Soria, when the film was shot: the leisurely, poetic and multi-layered documentary traces a year in the life of the town, which will shortly cease to exist as a living population. The film emphasizes the isolation of the village from the modern world whilst stressing its deep connections with the larger cycles of time: it begins with an old lady pointing out dinosaur footprints, moves through the Roman invasion of the area - after which many locals famously committed suicide rather than submit to Roman rule - and ends with fighter planes flying overhead, destination Iraq. But the "overheard" conversations are the best part. "One day," one old guy muses, "they'll put men on the moon". (Incredible that anyone in the West is still saying that, but there it is.) But wisdom abounds, too: an early scene has two guys digging their own graves in the cemetery (they have a lot of time on their hands in Aldealseñor). "Up to the last minute," one of them reflects, "you think you’re going to live forever". It's terrific stuff: the best films being made in Spain these days are documentaries.
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The Madrid attacks of March 11 2004 are commemorated in a potent documentary film called Todos íbamos en este tren (We Were All on That Train), which consists of 24 short pieces offering different perspectives on the tragedy. It is showing in only one cinema in the capital, and that cinema is in the barrio of Vallecas, far from the city centre, but close to where one of the trains was blown up. I saw the film at six o'clock tonight - and I was the only person in there. In theory it's good and necessary to remember tragedies - but the thought struck me, as I sat there alone, that perhaps nobody, least of all those close to the victims, actually wants to. See it if you can. 
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Sometimes, when you're reviewing films, you see something that practically nobody else alive has seen or will ever see. This is the case with Jóvenes, a decent little Catalan film I saw last week which has now disappeared from Spanish cinemas. It wasn't great, but at least it tried to say something intelligent about what being in your late teens (possibly, to some) feels like today. In my review I put "The moral is clear but not hammered home: ambitions fulfilled always come at the price of someone else’s unhappiness, but the consequences of their actions rank pitifully low in these characters' schemes of things". Hmmm. Now I look at it again, it doesn't actually seem to mean anything. But what was interesting was that at the end of the film, a girl about the same age as the characters in the film leaned over the passageway and asked a couple of guys she'd never met before "did you understand any of that?" The answer was no. So they'd just seen a film, supposedly about people like themselves, that they didn't understand. Is it any wonder Spanish cinema is in a permanent creative crisis, when it's failing to get its message across like this? Especially when the Minister of Culture is encouraging film makers to make films that will get young people into the cinemas? Jóvenes wasn't wildly experimental stuff - it just seemed to be trying to tell it like it is.

And while we're here: I did like Mar adentro a lot, but to give it a record-breaking 14 Goya awards is just ridiculous, and sends out messages that 2004 was a single-film year for the industry, which it wasn't. Héctor was good, and El séptimo día, and Inconscientes, and a few documentaries. La mala educación was fine, also - but won not a single Goya, whilst winning prizes everywhere else. The Spanish Film Academy's problem with Almodóvar is starting to look personal.
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The Goya Awards, Spain's Oscars, have just been announced, with Mar adentro receiving about 5,000 nominations and Almodóvar, famous for being shunned by the Spanish establishment whilst a god virtually everywhere else, gets only four. Less well-known are the Godoy Awards for the year's worst Spanish film. (In order to vote, you have to be a member of the Godoy Academy.) I've seen three of this year's five nominees, and they are indeed public health warning material, guaranteed to shake not only your faith in Spanish film but in human nature itself. I suspect that at least four of these movies, made in a "so-bad-it's-good" spirit of ultra-kitsch, would be proud to take the award. Don't bother watching out for these, and please avoid food before looking at the posters.
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Two trailers for the same film, the wonderful The Sea Inside by Alejandro Amenábar, which opens on limited release in the U.S. on December 17th. I've been banging on about it for a while, because Spanish films don't get this good too often. The Spanish trailer is terrific trailer-making, using a Ramón Sampedro poem as backing; just listen to the music behind it and watch Bardem's face when Belen Rueda asks him "Ramón, ¿por qué morir?" But then the Spaniards know all about Sampedro already, and don't need the context. The U.S. trailer doesn't do it for me. But do go and see the film. Not since It's a Wonderful Life will a film about suicide have cheered up your Christmas so much. This is the poem used in the trailer:

Mar adentro, mar adentro,
y en la ingravidez del fondo
donde se cumplen los sueños,
se juntan dos voluntades
para cumplir un deseo.

Un beso enciende la vida
con un relámpago y un trueno,
y en una metamorfosis
mi cuerpo no es ya mi cuerpo;
es como penetrar al centro del universo:

El abrazo más pueril,
y el más puro de los besos,
hasta vernos reducidos
en un único deseo:

Tu mirada y mi mirada
como un eco repitiendo, sin palabras:
más adentro, más adentro,
hasta el más allá del todo
por la sangre y por los huesos.

Pero me despierto siempre
y siempre quiero estar muerto
para seguir con mi boca
enredada en tus cabellos.
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I've just sent a very brief review of the documentary Las cajas españolas to Variety:

Anyone who has witnessed the artistic glories of Madrid's Prado Museum should enjoy Alberto Porlan's "The Spanish Boxes", which shows how close the gallery's contents came to not being there at all. This remarkable and well-researched if unimaginatively-told tale of the heroic Civil War efforts to save the old masters from the falling bombs by shuttling them around Europe represents a fascinating attempt to explore a hitherto largely-unexplored corner of Spanish history.

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 and the left-wing's tendency to hurl grenades at all religious iconography, the Republican government created an organization to protect Spain's art treasures. They were boxed up at great expense and sent first to Valencia, then to Catalonia, and then to Geneva, before they returned to Spain three years later. Along the way there are several fine anecdotes and a general sense of relief and gratitude that the noble efforts of a few have saved Velázquez, Goya and co for the many. This deftly put-together film neatly fuses 30's newsreels with artificially-aged footage featuring actors - a risky maneuver that comes off fine. The only quibble is the relentless voiceover.

See it if you ever get the chance to: there's a fine body of historically revisionist films coming out of Spain at the moment.
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I've mentioned this before on the blog, but it's worth mentioning twice, three times, as many times as you want. When even the critics weep, with their hearts of ink, then it's worth mentioning. Mar adentro (The Sea Within - check out the trailer at the link), a truly brilliant film by Alejandro Amenábar about Ramón Sampedro and starring Javier Bardem, is wowing them at the Venice Film Festival. I saw and reviewed the film for Variety in July, was duly stunned by it (the review now reads as though it was written by someone who'd been stunned into inarticulacy, and I can't link to it because Variety is a pay site). Since then the film has lingered on in my mind like few others, and seems to have become a part of me. I now feel that the review I wrote didn't say the half of it. Mar adentro is one to be seen and reseen and considered carefully, a film that reaffirms life through talking about death, that touches emotions which are too-rarely touched in front of a cinema screen, especially a Spanish one. Powerful stuff, and an instant Spanish classic - and it's probably coming to a cinema near you before Christmas 2004. You could probably do worse than have a flutter on Bardem for the Oscar - though that's no recommendation, of course. He must be getting sick of being described as "chameleonlike". There are criticisms you could make - that Sampedro, for example, can't possibly have been as saintly as Bardem is as him, and that the film is overtly manipulative and even a little overschematic - but such protests are swamped by it's compelling emotional logic. You can't gush on like this in a review, of course - you're a critic, and critics aren't human beings. If you're looking for a more balanced opinion than mine, then this is a nice article (in Spanish).

Incidentally, the Spanish premiere was attended by Zapatero and lots of his cabinet members - they want to be seen supporting Spanish cinema - which has led to (swiftly-denied) suggestions that they're about to reform the euthanasia laws.

A Spanish masterpiece; one of the great recent horror films (The Others); visited by presidents who are interested in his opinions on life and death. Alejandro Amenábar is 32.

Update: Actually, you can read the review here, though For Some Reason It All Looks Like This. Which Actually Makes It Almost Unreadable.
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