Chronicle of the Carlist War, 1872-1876

1922: Policarpo Amilibia, director of a journal in Bilbao, with a liberal tendency, and Inaxio Zatarain, an ex-carlist peasant volunteer of Guipuzcoa recall their youth. 1872: Amilibia is sent by his newspaper to gather news about the War in Guipzucoa and Navarre. Back in Bilbao, he witnesses the village siege by the Carlist troops. Once the siege raised, he goes to the battle front as a journalist for the liberal Army. Amilibia will carry out this post up to the end of the hostilities. On his side, Inaxio remembers how he entered the guerrilla war, encouraged by the politicized atmosphere of the Basque Country, after the revolution in 1868. Incorporated in the Regular Carlist Army, he will follow along with the Guipuzcoa battalion up to the end of the war in 1878. In this brief moment, both characters meet.

 

The Spirit of the Beehive

Victor Erice's (Karrantza, Bizkaia, 1940) hauntingly beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive features one of the most unforgettable child performances in the history of cinema. Hailed as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Erice's visually elegant "poem of awakening" takes place in a small Castilian village in the early 1940s, as echoes of the Spanish Civil Wart can still be heard throughout the countryside. It is here, in this richly rural atmosphere, that six-year-old Ana (played by six-year-old Ana Torrent) is introduced to alternate world of myth and imagination when she attends a town-hall showing of James Whale's Frankenstein, an experience that forever alters young Ana's perception of the world around her... and her ability to mold reality to her own imaginative purposes. Is she using her imagination to escape what is essentially a bleak reality, or is she protecting herself with an inner world of innocence, to counter the darker worldview of her slightly older sister Isabel? While her emotionally distant parents go about their mundane daily affairs, Ana's world becomes the film's mesmerizing focus, and The Spirit of the Beehive unfolds as an enigmatic yet totally captivating study of childhood unfettered by the strictures of reason. In Erice's capable hands, young Ana Torrent really isn't performing at all; her presence on screen is so natural, and so deeply expressive, that you almost feel as if she's living in the story being told--a story that retains its mystery and beauty in equal measure, full of visual symbolism and metaphor (including the title, which yields multiple meanings), yet never self-consciously "arty" or artificial. Simply put, this is one of the timeless masterpieces of cinema, produced at a time when Franco's repressive dictatorship was finally giving way to greater freedoms of expression. No survey of international cinema is complete without at least one viewing of this uniquely moving film.

El Viaje de Carol

Carol's Journey

"Carol's Journey / El Viaje de Carol", winner of the Berlin International Film Festival's Crystal Bear Award, and nominated for three Goya Awards (Spanish Oscars), and selected by some of the world's leading film festivals, including San Sebastian International Film Festival, "Carol's Journey," is a film about Carol, a Spanish-American twelve year old girl brought up in New York, who travels with her mother to Spain for the first time in the turbulent spring of 1938, to meet her mother's family. Separated from her father, a pilot in the International Brigades involved in the Spanish Civil War, whom she adores, her arrival in her mother's native village transforms the secretive family environment. Her innocent and rebellious nature drives her to oppose a conventional world new to her. Her friendship with Maruja, the village's teacher, together with the lessons in life learnt from her grandfather and her love for local boy Tomiche will take her on an unforgettable and bittersweet journey into the world of adulthood.