This trio of tales, based on classic short stories, chronicles the complicated relations between the sexes.
It is the year 1936 and the Spanish Civil War is raging. When the German commander of an international brigade is badly wounded he gives his five comrades a message which he divides up and secretes into in five cartridges. All five shells must reach the battalion in order for the message to be relayed. But Frenchman Pierre can’t bear the heat of the Sierra. When he leaves their hide-out to drink from a well he is hit by an enemy bullet.
Madrid, 1953. Gilda is a young orphan who difficultly survives in a ruined, post-civil war Spain. Opportunistic, ambitious and ruthless, she dreams of becoming a radio speaker and wants to get an official union card, a requisite for the job. She doesn't hesitate in joining an ultra-catholic fraternity and to become a police informant. But the suicide in prison of her aunt, a militant Republican, threatens to ruin her plans. She has only one solution left : to use her charms.
Collin
Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, the movies and fear in a religious school at the beginning of the 1960s. Father Manolo, director of the school and its professor of literature, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three are followed through the next few decades, their reunion marking life and death.
Spain, 1939. In the last days of the Spanish Civil War, the young Carlos arrives at the Santa Lucía orphanage, where he will make friends and enemies as he follows the quiet footsteps of a mysterious presence eager for revenge.
Two men share an odd friendship while they care for two women who are both in deep comas.
Lukas, a young schizophrenic man, has to deal with a new town, a new relationship, and the paranoia in his head.
Tiger Love silent film
During a mysterious thunderstorm, Vera, a young mother, manages to save a life in danger, but her good deed causes a disturbing chain of unexpected consequences.
Portrait of Costa da Morte (coast region in Galicia, Spain) from an ethnographic and landscape level, exploring also the collective imagination associated with the area. A region marked by strong oceanic feeling dominated by the historical conception of world's end and with tragic shipwrecks. Fragmentary film that approaches to the anthropological from its protagonists: sailors, shellfish, loggers, farmers ... A selection of characters representative of the traditional work carried out in the countryside in the region, allowing us to reflect on the influence of the environment on people.
Set in the early part of 20th century Europe. There lived a dancer who becomes the romantic bone of contention between a humble shepherd and an imperious marquis.
An undertaker gets married to an old executioner's daughter and, although he doesn't like it, must continue the profession of his father-in-law after his retirement.
A Spanish soldier seduces and falls in love with the young wife of a smuggler.
As every year Carlos is spending the summer in the country with his family in order to help out with things. Perhaps he won't even be returning to Madrid, as economic prospects are hardly rosy there. In addition, his father's health is failing and he needs Carlos to help. In this town, where the elders still celebrate the medieval rites, Carlos meets a young policeman Juan and they fall in love. A friendship ensues amidst age-old rituals and a crisis of a nation, all this set against a spectacular backdrop which seems somehow not of this world.
The attempted assassination of the American president is told and re-told from several different perspectives.
Leo is a middle-aged writer of popular romantic novels who writes under a pseudonym, but despises her own work. At home, her husband, who works overseas, is distant both physically and emotionally. As she reevaluates her life and writing, Leo is led to an unexpected relationship with Angel, a sensitive newspaper editor.
Diego is one of the chiefs of the Spanish Communist Party. On his way from Madrid to Paris, he is arrested at the border for an ID check but manages to get free. When he arrives in Paris, he starts searching for one of his comrade to prevent him from going to Madrid where he could be arrested.
In 1901, Elisa Sánchez Loriga adopts a male identity in order to marry the woman she loves, Marcela Gracia Ibeas.
Three siblings who detest each other and hiking must complete together a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in order to be eligible to inherit their mother's wealth.