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 father’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