Oliva Oliva

An attempt to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes violently, in the Basque Country, in northern Spain.

On the occasion of awarding the Cervantes Prize to the Catalan writer Juan Marsé on 23 April 2009, family members, friends and writers offer a sincere portrait of the best chronicler of life in Barcelona, Catalonia, during the post-war period and the worst days of the General Franco dictatorship, in the forties and fifties, and during the economic development and the hard conquest of freedom, in the sixties and seventies.

Crash 'n' Burn is an experimental film shot in and named after Toronto, Ontario's first punk rock club. (Not to be confused with Peter Vronsky's similarly titled 1977 documentary on the Toronto punk scene made for the CBC television network.) The film, shot on 16mm black-and-white stock, features performances by Dead Boys, Teenage Head, The Boyfriends, and The Diodes".

Somewhere in the Balkans, in a garden hidden by a large house, a story unfolds of a great love between two young women. Neither of them wishes to accept that their relationship might ever end. What happens, then, when one day fate takes an unexpected turn? Is it possible to part so suddenly from your beloved?

Piaf intime

When Spanish Civil War ends in 1939, some of the women who played a leading role in the creative and literary boom known as Generation of 1927, stay in Spain, sacrificing the spirit that had enlightened them; but many others take the hard and long path of exile.

The history of Bruguera, the most important comic publisher in Spain between the 1940s and the 1980s. How the characters created by great writers and pencilers became Spanish archetypes and how their strips persist nowadays as a portrait of Spain and its people. The daily life of the creators and the founding family, the Brugueras. The world in which hundreds of vivid colorful paper beings lived and still live, in the memory of millions, in the smile of everyone.

San Sebastián de los Reyes Bullring, Madrid, Spain, March 27, 1977. In response to the strange political alliances that were taking place between antagonistic forces in search of a self-serving consensus, the anarcho-syndicalist union CNT organizes a rally to denounce the reprehensible machinations of its adversaries. (Documentary shot in 1977; edited and released in 2011).

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.

Milicianes

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

A landscape is only a landscape until we know what lies beneath. Pozo Ibarra, in the Central Mountains of León, is a mining complex full of significant architectural attributes, and also the imposing and ruinous remnant of a painful past that passed the ideas of freedom, literally, through the stone, turned into a great mass grave. Now, when the sun goes down, the souls that inhabit it rise up, refusing to forget.

The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.

Actor Jeremy Irons embarks on an epic journey through the halls of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, two hundred years after its inauguration, along corridors where thousands of masterpieces of all time tell the lives of rulers and common people, and tales about times of war and madness and times of peace and happiness; because, as Goya said, imagination, the mother of the arts, produces impossible monsters, but also unspeakable wonders.

Trance dances and out of body projection. In front of the camera, Parvaneh Navaï becomes a mediator who enters in contact with and immerses into the energies of Nature, while her own energy radiates and echos in the forest ("selva"). The camera amplifies and expands her presence, transforming the forest into an imaginary space. The camera becomes a painter's brush.

This short, started early on into sobriety, finished about nine months in, is a collage of diaries and notes, collected from within addiction and into recovery.

This is Poe and Král's first effort, shot on small-gauge stock, before their more well-known endeavor The Blank Generation (1976) came to be. A "DIY" portrait of the New York music scene, the film is a patchwork of footage of numerous rock acts performing live, at venues like Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the dive bars of Greenwich Village and, of course, CBGB.

The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary. “An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”

When Spanish Civil War ends in 1939, some of the women who played a leading role in the creative and literary boom known as Generation of 1927, stay in Spain, freely or not, sacrificing the spirit that had enlightened them, adapting themselves —or pretending to do so— to the new feminine role imposed by the victors, who were determined to cage these free souls at home, to live just as wives and mothers.

The chronicle of the process, ten long years, that led to the end of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), a Basque terrorist gang that perpetrated robberies, kidnappings and murders in Spain and the French Basque Country for more than fifty years. Almost 1,000 people died, but others are still alive to tell the story of how the nightmare finally ended.