IFFR 2016

Jorge Grau

A modern(ist) take on the story of Actaeon who saw the goddess Diana nude, for which she turned him into a stag that would soon be killed by a pack of dogs - done here as a melancholic tale of big city alienation and class differences.

Pere Portabella & La Escuela de Barcelona

Acteón

Gonzalo Suarez

An aging actor transfers his soul into a doll to escape the boredom and the triteness of leisure. His assistant soon gets irritated by this uncanny object, while his erstwhile beloved is convinced that he must still be around somewhere. A true treasure of delirium and outrageousness.

Aoom

Jacinto Esteva Grewe

Life in a rural area where the sole source of income is the physically gruelling labour of salt mining. A composed, spectacular work of anger - and (com)passion. Screens before Dante no es únicamente severo.

Autour des salines

Carlos Durán

Scenes from the modern world - and why it must fall apart, despite its beauties. A true gem: a pop-art agit film. Screens before Después del diluvio.

BiBiCi Story

Glauber Rocha

An evil king, an oppressed people, a messianic shepherd: a nightmare, what else? A cinematic delirium, feverish dream, audiovisual exorcism whose allegory about fascism and how to erase it from this planet is still most useful. Rarely has political cinema been as savage and exhilarating.

Cabezas cortadas

A free-wheeling caprice featuring beautiful people in situations from life in a world we call modern and developed. A fascinating and enchanting work, very hip, pleasantly trendy, full of unexpected twists and turns, moving to a tune of inner unrest and difficult-to-define desire.

Cada vez que...

Ricardo Bofill

A meditation on man’s loss of contact with nature in the modern world and its consequences - maybe. An early short by one of modern architecture’s giants. Screens before Noche de vino tinto.

Circles

Joaquim Jordà

A beautiful woman tells one story after another, not all of which have an end and few have anything to do with one another - like a Scheherazade of 1960s modernist literature. A maze-like, pop-art saturated movie experience very much of its own kind.

Dante no es únicamente severo

One woman, two men - and none of the melodrama one might expect. In fact, the film’s true drama is in its colours: how everything begins and ends in green, how the red continues to create trouble and turmoil, how yellow and white stop connoting innocence. Quiet surface, tumultuous depths.

Después del diluvio

Ditirambo - patient man of action, truth-sayer and conscientious objector to smiling - always solves his case, whatever it is. A paean to the virtues of improvisation and humour. Screens before Ditirambo.

Ditirambo vela por nosotros

One day, a woman comes to Ditirambo with a job: He must search for one of her dead husband’s lovers and deliver her to her - revenge being a dish best served cold. A detective story in which the true culprit might be the whole idea of narrative cohesion. A classic of modernist Spanish cinema.

Ditirambo

"A fiction reportage about the architecture of a brain", as the subtitle has it. An essay of sorts based on scientific as well as sociological research. Also, a choice piece of psychodrama. All set in an environment halfway between a theatre stage and an asylum ward. Wow!

Esquizo

Vicente Aranda

A serial killer on the loose. A professor studying the characteristics of victims in order to cure them from their malaise. A beautiful model facing destiny. A Barcelona almost empty in a time that feels like the future. A political allegory in the guise of a pop-art giallo, set in the 1960s.

Fata morgana

Pere Portabella

A cinematographic symposium on the current political crisis of parliamentary democracy and the nation-state, how neoliberalist capitalism thrives on this, and what is to be done. Arguably the most important work of political cinema in a long time.

Informe general II. El nuevo rapto de Europa

On 20 November 1975, Francisco Franco dies. On 15 June 1977, Spain holds free elections for the first time in decades. What happens in this roughly year-and-a-half period is the stuff this monument is made of. An epic documentary about one nation’s journey into democracy.

Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública

A sometimes sober but more often almost delirious documentary about a rural Spain that seems utterly backward and unenlightened by reason - but for all its cruelty and horrors might be the most alive part of a country in which spiritually is slowly draining away. A rarely-seen non-fiction monument.

Lejos de los árboles

A famous Catalan writer/feminist/anti-fascist activist talks in the 1960s about her latest novel - which says a lot about the times as such. Looks simple, proves to be complex and engaging. Screens together with El sopar/The Dinner.

Maria Aurèlia capmany parla d'un lloc entre els morts

A documentary about a temporary art work by Joan Miró discretely turns into an essay on Catalan anti-Franco activism in the late 1960s. Screens before Umbracle.

Miró l'altre

José María Nunes

A woman, a man, a night of drinking and talking while walking through Barcelona’s Chinatown. A painfully precise yet kind and curious portrait of a generation struggling to rid itself of the constraints it was born into - Fascist Spain.

Noche de vino tinto

Paolo Brunatto

Why Spaniards left their home for Switzerland, among other places, and what this home looks like. A watershed in the history of Spanish documentary cinema. Screens before Far from the Trees.

Notes sur l'émigration. Espagne 1960

How did that dead scuba diver get into the treetop? Why is it so difficult for the author to explain what is happening in his novel Pont de Varsòvia? And what happened to Europe in the 1980s, really? A grand political essay done in the form of a cinematic riddle that refuses to be solved.

Pont de Varsòvia

Five political activists discuss their experiences in and outside prison - clandestinely. A key masterpiece of cinematic activism. Screens together with Maria Aurèlia capmany parla d'un lloc entre els morts.

El sopar

Bodies, water, the music of Gioachino Rossini: a hearty cinematic symphony of spectacular beauty and sensuality. <em></em>

La tempesta

Christopher Lee walks through an almost unbearably sunny, yet for the most part curiously empty, Barcelona. Critics discuss censorship. A long excerpt from a fascist film irritates in many ways; and more. Like its companion piece, Vampir - Cuadecuc, an utterly unclassifiable masterpiece of modernist film art.

Umbracle

Behind-the-scenes footage from the making of trash-meister Jess Franco’s enjoyably mediocre El conde Dracula (1970) gives a decidedly different ironic twist by way of an artificial soundscape created by a giant of Catalan modern music. A genuine solitaire of film art.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025