Welcome to Disney World.

 At the moment, Walt Disney is, in a phrase that my fifth-form English teacher would have used to illustrate redundancy, "extremely ubiquitous". SBS is doing the 2024 How Disney Built America six-parter, itself one of the US History Channel's How... serieses. Meanwhile, what was Fox Studios, with the old R.A.C. Sydney Showground lettering still on the gates, now has a sign reading "Disney" and buses roll down the streets covered with the campaign celebrating the release of the studio's new Elio. 

It occurs to me that my relation with Disney is now longer than any I've had with people I've actually known. Even before I found the Disney films, I homed in on their comic books - clean lines and distinctive characters. My formative years were punctuated with excursions to Sydney movie palaces doing Disney cartoon features double billed with Tarzan movies. When decades later l caught a beautiful new subtitled print of Tarzan's New York Adventure in a Paris art cinema, I remember being brought down by the realisation that I'd finally worked through all Johnny Weissmuller's jungle exploits. There were no more. I didn't exhaust Disney anywhere nearly so easily. Eventually, I would find myself seeking out Captain Eo at Anaheim and again at Euro Disney - that incidentally a whole lot less welcoming than  Futurescope, their competitor in the innovative projection systems market I was documenting. 

There was always something to relish in Disney titles, even when they were playing in TV-era near empty theatre sessions - the product reinvigorarted by CinemaScope for Toot Whisle Plunk Boom and Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood ("an outlaw for an inlaw"), The Aristocats' jam sessions crashing through successive ceilings or automation manufacturing the stampede for The Lion King - even the great effects work in live action like Blackbeard's Ghost. I will admit to being relieved when they stopped warbling Alan Menken's Broadway melodies but Robin Williams' genie and Josh Gad's  Frozen ice man warming his feet by the fire were still to come. After in-house Buena Vista Distribution released films for grown-ups and The Disney Channel appeared, the company went on to gulp down competitors Lucas Film, Marvel and Pixar,  

    Jason Gaignard

How Disney Built America goes for re-enactments, with unfamiliar-face performers Jason Gaignard (Witnesses) & Derek Kealy (Six Days in August) as yin & yang Disney brothers, Kealy's Roy forever stuck uneasily with the enabler role, cautioning against the cost of  Gaignard/Walt's ambitions. The series goes back to their Kansas City childhood but stops short of Euro Disney, their twenty-first-century triumphs and the current disputed policy of reviving the classic animations as live-action features. Personally, I thoroughly enjoy the Tim Burton Dumbo.

How Disney Built America is not the TV's first attempt to document Disney - include a 1988 PBS American Experience Ep., Jean Pierre Ibouts' 2001 Walt: the Man Behind the Myth, Samuel Doux' 2006 Il etait une fois ... Walt Disney /Once Upon a Time Walt Disney, along with the company's forays into self-portrait TV production, peaking with the fifties Mickey Mouse Club and its beaming Uncle Walt. In fact, Walt Disney must be in there, with Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ, as the figure to feature in the most documentaries ever. Despite all these, I find that the more you know about him, the less clear our impression becomes.

The studio head who took a day off to take Haley Mills on the Disneyland rides, when she arrived to do Pollyanna, also, I'm told, hounded a bored staff animator out of the industry for drawing the genitals on Chip and Dale in one frame (a twenty-fifth of a second). Disney, the voice of Mickey Mouse, attacked Art Babbit, the creator of Goofy, as a communist when Babbit led a 'forties company strike for better conditions and recognition. The man who Dali saluted as America's greatest surrealist was also abused by the high art community for debasing popular taste worldwide.

The basic narrative is pretty clear. After a Kansas City childhood, where early morning paper runs left the young Disney brothers dozing in classes and getting poor academic results, Walt volunteered for WW1, becoming an underage army driver, decorating the side of his ambulance and doing cartoons for Service papers. Back home with early animators Presman-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, he worked on the Laugh-O Grams series, and here How Disney Built America throws us a curve when one of their scholar commentators (who they field rather than survivors or family) describes their development of a universally lovable cartoon animal. No, it's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit! 

We hear about Producer Charles Mintz using their contract to make off with the character, leaving Oswald to be jostled by Krazy Kat and Scrappy in the obscurity of Winkler-Mintz Toons. Disney's obsession with Copyright Protection, dating from this, is only hinted though it got as far as the Sony Bono amendment, where Mickey Mouse was protected from the provisions of public domain by US Congress 

The Disneys started again, taking only their Winkler animator associate, Ub Iwerks. It was Ub who created Mickey Mouse, tracing the outlines off pocket change. Getting credit on the Mickey newspaper strip wasn't enough recognition and the dissatisfied cartoonist set up with Pat Powers, who had taken over the once mighty Felix the Cat franchise, doing Iwerks shorts there - the Willy Woppers, Flip the Frogs and the rest. That didn't work out either and back at Disney after the Reluctant Dragon, Ub would head up their effects work, and notably those for The Birds. Add animations for the Times Square Jumbotron. Incidentally, that's not a made-up moniker, like Parkyakarcus or Ishkabible. He was Norwegian and we'll see the family name again in the eighties, lettered across the Simulated Park Ride Theatre chain his son set up. 

 The Disneys launch Mickey just as sound comes in ("I think we should go see the Jazz Singer again") and, in an early example of what all biographers applaud as his thinking big, Disney sold his car to bankroll a repeat pioneer sonorisation of Steamboat Mickey. One of the current series' best moments is the glimpse of the staff manning slide whistles and xylophones in time to a picture projected on a bed sheet. We see them develop Donald's Iago to counter Mickey's bland Othello. Bluey take a hint!

There is more ambition when Walt gambles on an exclusive contract to use improved Technicolor and develops the multiplane process, replacing bench animation in achieving depth. Pioneering Xeroxing of cells and computerisatiom would follow. The series is not all that hot on film history. They do come up with a better copy of Oswald's debut in Trolley Trouble but cut it short and show the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiere as a wide-screen presentation more than a decade before the process actually arrived..

 Photographed in Multiplane Technicolor!

Snow White was key, a giant financial gamble, making the first feature-length, full-colour cartoon film. Just when money was running short, Walt is shown discovering shoddy Mickey dolls offered on a street stall and taking up merchandising, making a bare few thousand in his first year at the point where Snow White was draining the company finaces, still going back into production for multiplane sequences. Equally opportunistic Kay Kamen (Paul Chiusolo in the series) throws his savings on the Disney office table and regales them with the prospect of tie-in sales (lunch boxes, cereal packets) becoming a major revenue stream. Going global, they would later even open a big Disney Store on the Champs-Élysées. Disney becomes the world's leading spin-off merchant and Snow White is represented as the then biggest earning film, (until Gone With the Wind showed up? Birth of a Nation?) the substantial budget more than recovered. 

The French Once Upon a Time Walt Disney is good on WW2 with Walt wandering lost in his studio, commandeered for the military. This was a period of poor incomes on the new cartoon features and an unsuccessful return to a mix of live action and animation, like the Alice films which had been used in the twenties to try to establish the Disney Los Angeles base. (Not discouraged, Disney finally cracked this with the success of Mary Poppins) There are a few dodgy choices in there. I'd nominate the heart-shaped iris closing round the cherub's naked bottom in Fantasia as the cinema's most kitschy moment.

However, rather than fade away, Walt seized the moment. Backed by an extraordinary film-making organisation and an already fabulous library of In-House Product, he made a deal with ABC, the number three in the new U.S. TV networks and generated the broadcaster's first big hit, The Mickey Mouse Club ("Who's the leader of the club that's best for you and me?") This slotted in nicely with the company's now largely forgotten documentary True Life Adventures and British frozen asset bankrolled live-action movies.  I have an agreeable memory of Richard Todd as Rob Roy. 

Once again, Walt ignored accepted wisdom, filmed his Fess Parker Davy Crocket movies on the scale of Theatrical Features and kicked off a bonanza in selling 'Coonskin caps. However, what would have satisfied most ambitions became a launch pad for an even more impressive gamble, bankrolling his family-friendly theme Park at Anaheim outside Los Angeles. 

Disney had studied Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens and figured that he could provide an alternative to the perceived-seedy U.S. Carnivals of the day - think of the ones shown in movies like the Victor Fleming Hula, the Tod Browning Freaks or three of State Fair and a couple of Nightmare Alley. Walt wanted his park to be like walking into one of the company's movies. We see Roy saying that they were betting the farm in an area where the company had no experience.  Turned out workmen were still adding final touches the night before an opening, which was to be a live TV spectacular.

Ah, but there's more. Finding the Anaheim location surrounded by businesses and hotels that offended his quality control standards, Walt bought up a Florida swamp and converted it to the world's largest leisure destination, the EPCOT Center, offering in-built facilities spread around a people mover that engaged with his lifelong fascination with railroads. Even his 1988 death did not decelerate the project, with Roy taking over to ensure it was a monument to his brother's tenacity and vision...

Forty years later, we get Elio. The story centres on an orphaned army brat voiced by Jonas Kibreab, making a nice break from all those Disney princesses getting reunions in the house product. Living on a military launch base, he is in the care of his soldier aunt (re-voiced by Zoe Saldaña in Studio second thoughts). Substitute parenting has got in the way of her ambition to be an astronaut. The space-mad boy lead is all attitude. Wearing his kitchen drainer hat, he lies on the desert sand, where he's scratched a message urging aliens to collect him. In the manner of these, his walkie-talkie message gets amplified by the base radio disks and sent into space, in the wake of their explorer satellite. Sure enough, there is a light in the sky. Winning moment of his delighted "Oh boy, my first probe!"

Like Buck Rogers and Starman, Elio finds himself the one who has to defend Earth from Alien Invasion, despite finally fessing up that he's just a kid, to the freaky ambassadors from other planets.  They make a nice example of Pixar's no talking animals approach, with some great voice actors from series TV - Shirley Henderson, Jameela Jamil not to mention intimidating Brad (Everybody Loves Raymond)  Garret's war lord.

 Really, Elio is a striking demonstration of how durable the Snow White format has proved. Even dying couldn't remove the Disney stamp. The endearing young protagonist again finds themself in a hostile adult environment but, aided by eccentrics and winning critters, wins through, after a spectacular animation set piece, and ends endorsing family values. Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella were to be expected but Enchanted was a nice update there. Elio includes yet another scary transformation. (evil stepmother to hag, boys to donkeys, the sorcerer's apprentice brooms)  but now we have taken on board Terminator. with the film's most striking concept, the Elio replica substitute, a great mix of appealing and scary. 

Well, Elio scored Pixar's worst-ever opening weekend. Confusion reigns. Commentators are saying the suits weren't happy with a project that won't become a franchise, while Toy Story is already up to number five. Others object that the film should be recognised as a break with all that dulling sequels repetition. Fingers are being pointed at a public unwilling to accept the originality that formula cartoon releases lack and at feeble promotion, bringing the film out opposite heavyweight competition in the same market. Enthusiastic focus groups had indicated they still wouldn't pay to see it in a theatre and management executed a retooling to remove original director Adrian (Coco) Molina's "queer coded" diversity content. Little Elio was originally an environmentalist with an interest in fashion, which can still be glimpsed in the character's peculiar outfit (that did puzzle me). Political correctness does linger, making the one blonde kid in base school the bully but that character's only there briefly. This is, after all, the studio that left "New lamps for old" out of Aladdin so that Princess Yasmin wouldn't look ditzy. However, support of weirdos round the world with their ham radios, is genuinely cheerworthy, a better call out for inclusivity. Put them alongside the geek prophets of  Close Encounters or Moonfall. 

I'm not the target audience for Elio but it brightened my day.  If I was twelve, I'd be telling all my mates how great it was. I wait for developments and wonder whether the fuss will get Molina's original cut off the shelf. Don't expect another Flow. We only need one of those. Paul Grimault, the Wang Brothers, UPA, Raoul Servais, and Zagreb have come and gone but the Disney aesthetic is still with us. Ponder that one.

Barie Pattison

Scandinavian Film Festival

 Scandinavian film is a kind of austere undertaking. Childbirth and frozen tundra are familiar ingredients. Their major figures are a purposeful lot - Victor Sjöström, Carl Dreyer, Alf Sjöberg, the frequently dreadful Ingmar Bergman or the Dogma guys. The few Scandinavians who went in for energetic popular material, aimed at bringing the audience back next week, didn't get far with subtitles - think Tancred Ibsen, Gustav Molander or Hans Peter Moland. Approachable films are more likely to come from the Americas. With the minimal information available, I tend to prioritise their festivals. 

I picked a couple of titles here, almost at random. 

 Vejen hjem / Way Home is a characteristically challenging proposition, whatever way you come at it. It's curious to see it when I'm fresh from American Pastoral - Elle Fanning recruited by the Weathermen. The Danish counterpart is the most ambitious film treatment of ISIS I’ve watched. Islamic extremists have taken over the spot in movies reserved for Nazis and child molesters and with this one director Charlotte Sieling (Margrete den første) has to convince viewers that what she is putting on screen is a plausible reality as well as field something that is involving dramatic entertainment.

The film starts with a minibus load of stragglers disgorged onto the desert slopes of the Syrian border, on their way to join “The Free Syrian Army.” Among this lot, spot the mature features of bearded Nikolaj Lie Kaas, an important Danish star, though the bulk of his work hasn’t reached us. He's in Adam’s Apples and the Department K Series, that ran to the Flaskepost fra P, a spin-off feature directed by Moland.

Way Home - Kass

Kass carries a concealed photo of a teenage boy and a cell phone he uses to call home to inform his separated wife about his progress in locating the fugitive son. The kid has joined ISIS. Kass manages to reassure other Danish would-be recruits about his contact with the Mosque back home and when he proves to be down with handling an automatic rifle, after his army tour in Afghanistan and Iraq, he’s welcome. Ambushed with one of the patrols of their unit, he’s the one to return fire and rescue blundering novice Aria Kashef, who he joined with. The kid is the first to vouch for Kass’ commitment to Jihad after that.

We get a scene where jets take out the car ahead of the group on the desert road. Our lot rush to help retrieve their wounded child from the burning vehicle, only to have his parents make off with their own transport, stranding them.

Kass' unit is overrun by an ISIS command, who consider their tolerant brand of Islam offensive. The prisoners are lined up bloodied, while through the window Kass spots son Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt (they appeared together in the series  Familier som vores). The kid’s chores include punching boys younger than him in the gut, as part of their training. Kass has to join the execution of his recent comrades in arms. The film’s most telling image is his son applauding enthusiastically. 

     Way Home - Kass

The commander, speaking British English, incorporates Kass into his force, joining them in worship (“No man prays alone, except on the battle field”) where our hero, now in the black scarf uniform, is just a fraction out of time with the rest, checking his neighbors on when to bow their heads or kneel.

 Sieling's background is in documentaries and she first saw the project as non-fiction. Some of her research turned up as the story of one recruit who refused to go into battle claiming his Nike trainers had been stolen, which here metamorphoses into Kass warning new recruit Kashef about wearing tennis shoes in combat. The film’s most telling passages are the secret meetings between father and son, where the boy has embraced the structure his family never provided, along with his new martyr status (“Death is more important than life”) These come contextualised by a call to the judgemental mother (voice of Trine Dyrholm) resigned to the loss of her son, which his father still refuses to accept

It is all heavy stuff and the mounting needs to be flawless. I couldn’t help picturing the set decorator painting those convincing raised fist stencils on the white walls of the Jordanian settings. It’s a tribute to the uniform excellence of the performances that the impact of on-screen events does register. This is a film that stays with the viewer.

Also on show was Frederik Louis Hvild's De lydløse/The Quiet Ones, an account of the 2008 Copenhagen cash warehouse break-in, which remains the biggest theft in Danish history. 

We start with sculpted torso boxer Gustav Dyekjær Giese (Retfærdighedens ryttere/Riders of Justice), who at thirty is training for his last crack at the championship. He is approached by fellow hard man, English-speaking Radar  Kateb from Un prophète, the film's most familiar face. With the responsibility of a young family and the upcoming title shot, Giese at first participates only in the proposed robbery's planning stages. However, a failed break-in by a rival gang and a visit to the site, that shows him security is feeble, convince him to take over. 

Meetings have been in the grubby gym and dim underground parkings, all filmed in that murky high grain style that we wished had gone out of fashion. A  cut to a domestic scene introduced by a close-up of hands washing up in the kitchen sink brings hope of a lightening of tone but no such luck. Kateb is soon drowning squeeze Ida Cæcilie Rasmussen in the basin. 

The crew set about stealing a fleet of garbage trucks to block pursuit on roads spread with nails and digging up Kalashnikovs ("war guns - dirt won't stop them"). The preparation is the best element of the film, with Giese psyching himself up the way we've seen him prepare for the ring.

The job itself is staged on a disappointing small scale. The earth mover, which is supposed to smash the vault wall at first try, proves inadequate, while cop cars swarm to the scene, only to keep their distance waiting for the SWAT team. Trim security guard Amanda Collin, who we've seen uneasily asserting herself in this macho world, shows up, raising hopes of her big scene, but that's a letdown. When it's all over and they are dividing up a "remote shit house" full of cash (dollars, krona and euros only), Giese checks reports to see if she is all right.

After a bank job that's not as good as the one in Rififfi, we get the ending of the Stanley Baker-Peter Yates Robbery turned around a bit. This one gets by but it would have been nice to see the unfamiliar context deliver more.

 

Barrie Pattison - 2025.

Spooks South of the Border

Mexican film making appears to be the most active of the Hispanic industries but outsiders continue to ignore it. We know it's there because observers, who would never go in, pass their U.S. Spanish language theatres and international celebrities occasionally have worked in their films - Toshiro Mifune, Alida Valli, John Carradine, Max Von Sydow.  Mexican cinema broke into the festival circuit a couple of times, once after World War II, with the films of Emilio Fernández, María Félix, Pedro Armendáriz and others. More recently, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón launched Gael García Bernal.  

Mexican trash cinema is more relevant for our purposes - fat comedians slapping the bottoms of naked women, Latino kung fu fighters and masked luchadore wrestlers.  Mexican monster movies penetrated VHS, notably with the collection that K Gordon Murray dubbed for the 'States. However the history, nature and quality of the country’s vast output remains largely mysterious.

A corner of the curtain has been pulled back with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, the Film Project restoring two nineteen-thirties titles alongside their more austere ventures.

Ramon Peron’s 1933 la llorona (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwtlaAV) is said to be the first example of the Horror films which became a staple of the busy Mexican film business. It is clearly intended for the market that was absorbing the contemporary Hollywood entries. Among the Spanish language parallel versions of the first sound films, George Medford’s Dracula, shot on the decors of the Lugosi version, would have been an obvious model. Peron’s film got points locally for utilising Mexican subject matter, the legend of the wronged woman who becomes a weeping, child-drowning ghost.  The story comes back at regular intervals in their country’s films.

This production is clearly the work of people still learning sound filmmaking.  It is too slow and drab to be more than a curiosity for most of its run time. Severely padded, not unlike the first feature-length silents, this one kicks off with one of its unnecessary subplots, where a man passing a cemetery gate is terrorized by the Llorna shriek - CU of face with rictus grin and dissolve from the victim’s hand on the footpath to it on a sheet in the operating theatre. 

Ramon Pereda, the doctor there, goes home, where all is not well. His young son is enjoying his birthday party, unaware that he is menaced by the family curse, which claimed an earlier member at his age, while a sinister hooded figure with an Aztec ring is using secret passages that no one seems to have noticed.

In the library (a bookcase, a desk and a couple of suits of armor) Paco Martinez, the boy’s grandad, reads the story of the viceroy-era ancestor (also Pareda) who wouldn’t acknowledge his out-of-wedlock child, to the anguish of the kid’s mom, Adriana Lamar. In the street, frill collar foot-pads set upon Pareda in an unequal sword fight (passable choreography but dull choice of angles). Witness Marquis Alberto Marti comes to his aid, sending them on their way. Turns out that the aristo. is an admirer of Lamar and takes a dim view of the faithless lover, starting another duel.

 La llorna - wedding

Dastardly Pereda marries better in a lengthy church service and doubles back to collect his child from what he sees as his own house. In the ensuing friction, the mother dies and flies off as a double-exposed ghost. Back in the then-present, we get more action from the hooded figure, comic retainer Carlos Orellana and servants who have been in the family for generations. It’s time for Martinez to crack open another book of which the contents are represented by double-exposed shots of steel helmet conquistadors montaged rotating. Grandpa is killed with a stubby antique knife and the cops are called but the black hood figure makes off with the child,  placing it on the Aztec altar in the cellar, before the good guys catch up with them. Police inspector Alfredo del Diestro proclaims that there was no ghost, only to see a manifestation of La Llorna.

La llorna : secret passage

Simple minded stuff with a nasty/tacky quality not unlike like Edgar Ulmer’s contemporary U.S. The Black Cat, nothing particularly imaginative or accomplished here. Their Llorna doesn’t even weep let alone drown children, though it does manage the character’s shriek.  

However the second recovered piece, the following year’s El fantasma del convento/The Phantom of the Monastery (https://ok.ru/video/6739623611120) is a genuinely scary movie, more so than its Hollywood prototypes were prepared to be, and a distinct advance. Put that down to the Mexican industry’s growing experience and the promotion of  Fernando  De Fuentes from script collaborator to writer-editor-director, confirming his status as their leading pre-WW2 film maker. We are lucky that it arrives in an impressively restored, English-subtitled copy.

        Carlos Villatoro & Marta Ruel

Credits cut straight to leads, elegant Marta Ruel with husband Enrique del Campo and their friend Carlos Villatoro stumbling about in some studio bushes, which the film assures us are a ravine. They look for shelter to Victorio Blanco, the cowelled monk encountered with his huge dog and he ushers them to the nearby monastery (locating long shots don’t match) where they get the whole treatment - vows of silence and separate cells, the shadow of a bearded monk flagellating, mummified hands, a meal that turns to ashes, a door barred with a decaying wooden cross and a Jeremiah quotation, and a howling wind which sends the anguished monks into despair.  Blacno & the dog, who Prior Martinez (la llorna’s grandad) told them didn’t exist, show up - don’t ask!

We get the backstory of Brother Rodrigo, who deployed a satanic book to steal the wife of his friend and who the monks attempt to contain in the closed cell.

Villatoro

When the visitors turn in, things get really spooky with the inexplicable bat shadow on the wall (an ingenious deployment of the film’s glass shot technology). Villatoro’s lusting for Ruel parallels that of the cursed Rodrigo. When he finds the barred cell open, he uncovers a shrouded body (clumsy face make up) wlth a shrunken hand which falls on the book beside it - and Ruel arrives, desire gleaming in her eyes.

Comes the dawn and the disturbed trio encounter jolly caretaker José Ignacio Rocha, who assures them there are no monks there and shows them the inexplicably decayed dining hall (which still has the accusing word “corbade” Ruel scratched on the long table) and a vault with the mummies of long-dead monks. The trio exit into sunny rural normalcy.

Despite the limitations of Mexico’s early sound filmmaking (dodgy make-up and wardrobe and some unsteady pacing evident), this one mounts to the genuinely disturbing scene in the finally opened cell. The film has an intensity that its US models couldn’t or wouldn’t match. Fuentes had mastered ignoring logic and narrative in favour of atmosphere and shock. It is not the simple-minded affair it resembles with Ruel’s cynical take on events set against formula elements. “Quien sabe?”

Long before The Exorcist, Mexican cinema had brought into play the exploitation potential of Catholicism -  religious robes & ceremony, martyrs, damnation, scourging, crucifixion, resurrection. A comparison between this film and European Biblical movie drama makes a viewer sharply aware of differences. La Llorna has its extended Cathedral marriage and a third restored film, Juan Bustillo Oro’s Dos Monjes is also set in a Monastery. My favorite touch in Fernand Méndez' 1957 El Vampiro is the disinterred aunt who spends the whole film proffering a giant ceramic crucifix.  Mix this with indigenous religion, as in The Day of the Dead.  When it came to a battle of imageries, contemporary Marxist states were totally upstaged. Best they could manage was a few Union Parade banners or maybe a panorama of hands raising rifles above the heads of the crowd.

Fantasma - Martinez, Villatoro, Ruel  & Del Campo, with Last Supper mural.

The personnel on these films continued working into the fifties and beyond. Generally, despite determined effort, I’ve never been able to see their other work, about which I remain curious. De Fuentes' excellent Vamonos con Pancho Villa did slip into my grasp a few years back, another film that is not as simple-minded as expected. That makes the current discoveries more valuable than they might be. The fact that The Ghost of the Monastery proved remarkable is a nice bonus. It really is time that I tried to track down Fuentes's other work. 

Santo's Mummies of Guanajuato -  compare Fantasma.

.

Barrie Pattison 2025.

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2025.

A new Spanish Film Festival is a welcome reminder that even in what are not the best of times, it can still be worth going to the movies. As well as adventurous handling, the Spanish films are energised by showing recent history as a live issue. The selection I saw tended to the grim side. Alex De Iglasea and Santo Segura were missed. Let's also note these Hispanic Film events have a large Latin American element. Once again, we score a significant part of the year's best viewing. I regret that it's too expensive and too time-consuming to work through the whole card, but cherry-picking the 2025 selection had its rewards.

Rafa Cortéz’ (back after the 2006 Yo) provided Amanece en Samaná / Samana Sunrise, which turned out to be unexpectedly substantial.  It’s a (sort of) multiverse movie. There are a few of those in the manner of the lingering Marvel model - Redux Redux in the Sydney Film Festival. They get compared to Sliding Doors  (people forget Mario Adorf in Straße der Verheißung  (Street of Shame)  but this one veers closer to Jimmy Stewart's vision in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Luis Tozar, Bábara Santa-Cruz & Luis Zahera

The new film kicks off with two old-friend middle aged couples flying into a  pre-season Samana resort. Maria Louisa Mayol & Luis Tosar (previously together in Fatum) and Luis Zahera & Bárbara Santa-Cruz (Tres bodas da mes) are not the most interesting subjects, filmed too close and squabbling about opening the hotel's sealed liquor or  Tosar’s dull job in his father-in-law’s paper works - from habit he evaluates the Hotel’s menu cards. We wonder what the imposing actor is doing in this lightweight. We find out.

Maria Louise lets slip that way back she manipulated the loss of her car keys to set in train her marriage to  Tozar and, in the confrontation which follows, she hits her head on a rock. That puts her out only to wake as the long-time wife of Zahera, who she detests. The new sleeping arrangements send her spare. Everyone thinks she’s nuts when she tries to conform events to the old model. Holidaying Fellow guest, English-speaking therapist Charles Dance suggests, via his beach boy translator Andresito Germosen De La Cruz, that they should indulge her till she recovers and Santa Cruz keeps on banging her with Beach Tennis paddles to try and jolt her back to reality. 

The piece moves past the comic material into Maria Louisa’s alarming realization that she has ruined men in two realities and that her son now has Santa Cruz for a mother. Both Zahera and Tozar have disturbing monologues about the lives she has created for them. Maria  Louiza goes to sleep apalled but sun up brings yet another reality. There's no boring explanation footage either.

Production gives an illusion of lush life and the performers make what you would expect to be trivial material into something genuinely disturbing. This one is unsettling.

Marcel Barrena’s El 47  rivals it as a hit of the event.

His opening recalls the De Sica ll tetto.  Here the Catalan-speakers have been moved from now desirable Extremadura land to a remote hill area on the other side of the mountain from Barcelona. They try to exploit a legal loophole where they can squat a structure if it has a roof at sunrise, extorted by the building materials salesman and seeing their work smashed by the Guardia Civil patrol, when it remains incomplete by dawn.  They turn to Eduárd Fernandez for leadership and he says don’t build a district. Everyone work on putting up one house at a time. One scornful opponent says “Whose house gets built first?” and Eduárd comes back, “Yours!” The troopers, back next sunrise with sledgehammer workers, are outsmarted. We have established our hero, the officer, the residents and caring nurse-nun, Clara Segura whose religion is confronting to Eduárd.

Cut, with overlapping sound, and it’s become 1958 Torre Baró, a newly built-up hillside with bricks holding the flat roofs in place and residents complaining about inadequate power, water and transport. The men play cards out of doors and Segura has given up her calling to marry red Plaza Carelunya bus driver Eduardo and run the community school in an abandoned trolley car, where the kids have to hold the plastic on the window to keep out the wind.

There’s a fatal house fire.  The brigade can’t get the wagon up the grade and water supply fails, which is breaking point for Eduárd. He wants his bus company to run a Torre Baró route but no one seems to know how he should make an application, including the clerk who has to handle the paperwork. A fellow driver vandalises Eduárd's bus in protest and the union organiser claims to be unable to help. However a regular passenger is a council clerk and figures it out. Our hero says that one will be mayor one day.  Winning teen daughter Zoe Bonafonte is brought back from the station by the scornful policeman, when she’s caught joining in protest graffiti-ing city hall. The cop sees himself as being helpful (“People fall out of windows there”) The lavishly decorated council chambers and public buildings contrast with basic homes. When Eduárd finally gets to make his nervously rehearsed pitch,  they say the bendy buses can’t get up the hill.

Our hero won’t take no and hijacks his own bus for a rousing finale, where they have to board over potholes and knock down markers to make the climb. As they complete the run, the sedate scoring gives way to the cheering residents' traditional music, along with their towering carnival stilt men.

The film effectively offers incidents as spontaneous indignation. This gets to be winning as when Torre Baró’s women and girls, who never learned to read, file into Segura’s meager classroom for lessons or the diverse passengers elect to stay on Fernandez' co-opted bus - lawyer, well well-dressed older woman and finally the daughter. There’s not a dry eye in the house and they do it again with the school choir, where the other members leave the stage and Bonafonte standing alone does the Republican “Gallo nero, gallo rojo” song, to the befuddlement of the teacher.

Film making avoids glossy production values, matching the washed-out tones of the old location footage and conforming the format to the Academy frame, like The Phonician Scheme and this event's Ocho. Fernandez has made the jump from leading man to imposing character actor and, as in their immigrant smuggling piece Mediterraneo, he and director Barrena are an impressive combination. El 47 is pretty much the text book on activist filmmaking, though the most political it gets is the account of Falangists putting four rounds into the lead’s father. The makers must have liked that, using the actual driver character reading his late parent’s letter as an epilogue. The final insert of putting up the bus stop sign deserved a round of applause - and got it. How often does that happen at a movie?

Also on their hits list came la infiltrada /Undercover a Spanish cop piece, which started with a couple of extra claims on our attention. It deals with the unfamiliar Basque Nationalists’ ETA movement, whose graffiti the art department dawbs on the genuine locations (and would have had to put in time scrubbing off after the shoot) and it features Luis Tozar again. His briefing, where he describes the difference between undercover and covert work, is the point where the film takes hold and once again the makers signal their approval by repeating it at the end. Tozar takes second billing to director Arantxa Echevarría’s regular star, Carolina Yuste - think a young, non-singing Barabara Streisand.  

 

Yuste has the central role of the provincial girl who witnesses a nineties ETA murder at the film’s opening, being inspired to become a cadet at the Ávila Police Academy. National Police commander Tozar spreads photos of the graduating class on his superior’s table and, over his objections, picks out hers, saying that all previous attempts to infiltrate the terrorists have been detected and they have to choose the least likely. Later at a key moment, a woman on Tozar’s team, who has become pregnant, similarly intervenes as their least suspicious-looking member.

The bulk of the films covers the eight years in which Yuste moves to San Sebastian and establishes herself with Basque sympathisers, fly postering the city and working with their theatre group till she is trusted to the point where they have her take in an organisation man wanted for a murder, getting a new apartment especially.  Tozar’s team is nearly caught putting in secret microphones. The fugitive turns out to be a presentable young man to whom Yuste is unwillingly drawn. His disconnected recall of the assassination attempt that put him on the most wanted list, is one of the film’s highlights.

 The film etches in the political background, where the National Police Unit is constantly frustrated by the successes of the competing Guardia Civil getting all the glory, so that what becomes eight years of work, with Yuste dealing on a daily basis with people who could kill her instantly, looks like being wasted. Funding cuts are given as an excuse but they suspect the influence of their law enforcement rivals who have just had a well-publicised success. The Basque separatist movement gets no analysis, with the film’s last word a reference to the eight hundred and fifty murders down to ETA.

Yuste resists orders to quit, though she now scrubs her skin after contact and conflicts with the organisation bigwig she drives for, facing off with him about his carrying a give-away pistol. He comes close to exposing her, calling the numbers on her cell ‘phone menu as he prepares his major outrage - and he has rotten taste in TV programs, does sloppy house cleaning and maltreats her cat, which becomes a key element.

The crisp location photography is an asset and editing, that breaks out in three second cuts during the action material, gets attention but it is the uniform standard of performance that is the main asset. This is not an unfamiliar subject. Think Bullets or Ballots, The Street With No Name or Nevada Smith. Miriam Hopkins’ “treating friends as enemies and enemies as friends” outburst in Virginia City is a remarkably close match. However this film can claim to be the most plausible and detailed version we have on film. It has been a hit in its home market. 

Julio Medem is on the way to being Spain's most admired director and there's no way to deny the ambition of his new Ocho/8.

However the film is hard to follow with its eight successive time shifts over ninety years from the Spanish Civil War to the present, marked by relevant changes in screen formats. Performers come back as their descendants to confuse the issue. 

Medem, Alvarro Morte & Javier Rey 

In 1930’s Spain, Republicans and the Royalists face off over the recent election as two babies are born in adjacent villages, with the doctor having to rush from one delivery to the other - in tinted monochrome Academy Frame.

Needless to say, the two children grow in hostile camps with Ana Rujas marrying Javier Rey the soldier member of the firing squad that offs his opposite number, the free thinker school teacher following an order personally signed by Generalisimo Franco. Rey becomes a conservative business success, who expects his wife to attend church in severe clothes, (veil & no neckline) She skips mass to make it with cab driver Alvarro Morte,  but their pairing is sabotaged by his mum’s demise, meannig her stuffy husband ends up raising a child that’s not his a couple of screen ratios later.

The first elections in forty-one years coincide with Catalan separatist demos in which one of Rujas' sons is killed by the other, who gets fifteen years (and a shift to full screen two to one) before the leads are united in one of those technically impressive but eerily off-putting aged make-ups.

The two branches of the family scrap at the wedding anniversary lunch, about the time Anna gets the grim prognosis and takes to the bed we saw her born in at the opening.

It’s meant to tell us something about Spain as a divided society where the Republican heritage is the one to treasure, while impressing with its inventive technique, but it holds attention more from curiosity than content - distractions like lengthy mobile camera work that has us trying to spot the invisible edits when characters leave the studio process photography car and enter genuine exteriors.

This one may have taken on the less-than-inspiring model of The Brutalist.

 

Marina Seresesky's Sin instrucciones/Babies Don’t Come With Instructions is a feel-good movie with a twist. This one is agreeable enough and has a good standard of production, though it seems made to order.

Paco Leon & Maia Zaitegi

Established comedian Paco Leon (Tribu, Mamá o papá) does the middle-aged dropout who has the perfect life as a Canary Islands drinks waiter with plenty of female company, when old fling Silvia Alonso shows up with a baby, which she dumps on Leon. She burns down his sea front home and scoops the cash out of the cafe till, so Paco’s options are shrinking but he pursues her to Blbao (lots of scenics in this one) with a photo of Alonso in a park there as his only clue. He gets arrested in the company of amiable unlicensed black umbrella salesman Malcolm Treviño-Sitté, whose help he enlists along with the scaffolder who saw our hero rescue the kid from a plank walkway despite his (laboured) fear of heights. They become the basis of his new life - eight years later and we cut to his playpen home where he raises Maia Zaitegi without too much reliance on teachers, of which the school councilor takes a dim view. 

To complicate matters Alonzo shows up again, having kicked her habit and acquired a so nice German fiancé. Ah! but there’s more.

Bright colours, beautiful people, baby poo, beach scenics, shooting on the roof of the Ghery Guggenheim museum, legal complications and a twist ending. The audience seemed happy.

Calladita, the first film of writer-director Miguel Faus, aims at being a sexy Latino lesson on social inequalities but runs too long and too familiar. Despite realist ambitions, it's a lesser entry in the Regles de jeu-Theorema-Parasite cycle about perverse relations between employers and servants. The hand of promoter Stephen Soderberg is vaguely visible - what credited Mike Judge contributed less so,

 The opening shot reveals Colombian maid Paula Grimaldo, framed in what proves to be a window whose glass she is cleaning. The symbolism of the invisible partition is maintained. Turns out that she is working for the rich Barcelona art dealer family holidaying in their Costa Brava rental home, while they nurse the sale of the giant garden sculpture that will be their biggest deal. Politeness and consideration are, of course, a deception as they string Paula along with the prospect of residency and the gift of an out-moded Super Mario console. She maintains the home's showroom finish, while encouraging stray cats with the canned sardines she was supposed to poison for them, after the grandfather has the owner take out the one she was petting with a shotgun blast, leaving blood for her to clean up. 

Quiet Maid - Paula Grimaldo

Paula pilfers skimpy bikini-clad or topless blonde daughter Violeta Rodriguez’ pink cell ‘phone to arrange a Tinder rendezvous, making out with the contact while the family is away - anal in the pink (again) Flamingo float in the pool. The brother also goes full frontal and there’s the illicit beach party with the neighbor’s clued-in maid, attention-getting Nany Tovar, and the guy who turns agro when Paula won’t accept his come-on.

The plan of Paula, working to finance the education of her younger sister, hits the shredder about the time the family all prove to be despicable, even Gramps admitting that the residency thing depends on her staying with them as a menial. Climax and the point where the film can claim to be cutting edge, is the son, and his yobo drinking mates, all abruptly in big close-ups, offering the prospect of laying the money to solve her problems on the table if Paula will blow them. She gets to be the focus of our sympathy turning them down and he rats her out about the flamingo to mother Adriana Gil, still recognisable from her glamour parts - La Belle Epoque.  Complications with the signature to a Crypto fund - like the one that's a source of the finance for this film.  

Calladita is glossy but not altogether polished. Elements are planted obviously - the poison, the cats, the inflatable, the sculpture we expect to get smashed - but most are not deployed in the way we anticipate, which is not all that clever but still worth a look. Grimaldo is plausible and her being as calculating as the exploitator family is a passable twist. The film only has traction when she considers and rejects the low life solution to her problems.

An intresting enough opening offered hope for Sebastián Schindel’s grim Argie drama Una muerte silenciosa / A Silent Death. The staff at Alejandro (El Bar) Awada’s Estancia Copenhague Patagonia hunting lodge are helping American guests shoot an imposing Twelve Point Stag in the snow -- dark riders on the white background. The sheep-stealing family nearby are glimpsed through telescope sights on the hunting rifle. Told a few sheep are not a big deal, Awada responds “I will lose respect.” Meanwhile, there’s a triangle situation between youngsters - Gonzalo Garrido the photographer son, Ramiro Pintor, a dope-smoking smuggler and local girl Sol Wainer. Tensions develop when Pintor ups the price on the Mauser pistol Garrido wants to buy as a gift for his dad and it becomes an erratic murder weapon, killing the girl. The local gendarmes do interviews with the people who were in earshot of the lethal second burst of pistol fire.

Unsatisfied with the inconclusive investigation of his niece’s death, hunter Joaquín Furriel  (El año de la Furia) makes his own inquiry, despite his sleeping pill addiction and the suspicious circumstances of the driving accident which killed his brother, when the wagon they were in turned over.

None of the possibilities of the early scenes deliver. Frequently dim ‘scope images and art director detail (charging an ammunition clip,  the Copenhagen snow globe, a red lit dark-room, purloined VHS tapes, skinning stolen sheep) don’t make the intrigue any more involving. The cast suggests they might impress in better material.

Not every film was a beauty but I can't help wishing the material we get from other sources hit the standard of these.

Alvarro Morte, Javier Morgarde & Ana Rujas filming Medem's 8

Barrie Pattison 2025