När Franco stal Eurovision

Brigadistas

The emotional journey of Margalida Bover, who was the lover of the anarchist militant Salvador Puig Antich, convicted of murder and executed by Franco's regime in 1974.

Waffen-SS officer Otto Skorzeny (1908-75) became famous for his participation in daring military actions during World War II. In 1947 he was judged and imprisoned, but he escaped less than a year later and found a safe haven in Spain, ruled with an iron hand by General Francisco Franco. What did he do during the many years he spent there?

Two small-town aspiring musicians chase their pop star dreams at a global music competition, where high stakes, scheming rivals and onstage mishaps test their bond.

A television documentary charting the history of the Eurovision Song Contest and its impact on European political and social structure.

In the mountains of Madrid, Spain, a railway track on an abandoned bridge and a poem erased from the wall of a ruined building reveal a deliberately silenced story: the system established by Franco's dictatorship after the civil war (1936-39) that allowed hundreds of companies to use thousands of convicted Republicans as slave labor.

The pro-Palestinian, anti-capitalist, BDSM-provocative, techno-punk performance art ensemble Hatari unsurprisingly drew attention to themselves with their performance at the Icelandic qualifiers for the Eurovision Song Contest. So much so that they won and therefore were allowed to perform at the main event in Tel Aviv. But what now? Should they boycott the event, swallow their idealism, or use their airtime to criticise the host country for their illegal occupation of Palestine? The Icelandic director Anna Hildur joins the boys in the band all the way to the fateful final.

Documentary about the "cárcel vieja" of Murcia

What was the role of women in Spanish cinema from the 1930s to the present explained through fragments of different films, both fiction and non-fiction. (Followed by “Manda huevos,” 2016.)

The amazing story of Cifesa, a mythical film production company founded in Valencia by the Casanova family that managed to dominate the box office during the turbulent times of the Second Spanish Republic, the carnage of the Civil War and the hardships of the long post-war period and Franco's dictatorship — and survive until the sixties, when Spain was timidly beginning to change.

This documentary, filmed clandestinely, is based on several interviews with the executioners who worked in Spain during the early 1970s, as well as families of people executed by them.

La Grande Histoire de l'Eurovision

In the late sixties, Spanish cinema began to produce a huge amount of horror genre films: international markets were opened, the production was continuous, a small star-system was created, as well as a solid group of specialized directors. Although foreign trends were imitated, Spanish horror offered a particular approach to sex, blood and violence. It was an extremely unusual artistic movement in Franco's Spain.

The history of how the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art of Cuenca was created. In the mid-1950s, the Spanish collector and painter Fernando Zóbel de Ayala (1924-84) becomes fascinated by the young generation of Spanish abstract artists, so he begins to collect their works to show them to the public in Toledo. Until Gustavo Torner, a young forest engineer interested in art, proposes him to visit his city, Cuenca.

Spanish jurist and republican thinker Antonio García-Trevijano (1927-2018) expounds his political thought and reflects on the recent political history of Spain.

An unprejudiced portrait of Spanish folklore and a crude analysis in black and white of its intimate relationship with atavism and superstition, with violence and pain, with blood and death; a story of terror, a journey to the most sinister and ancestral Spain; the one that lived far from the most visited tourist destinations, from the economic miracle and unstoppable progress, relentlessly promoted by the Franco regime during the sixties.

The sarcastic account of the assassination of five Spanish politicians between 1870 and 1973 is mixed with the narration of five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by five skillful pencil artists. A documentary, a video essay, a collage, a provocative experiment where various pop culture figures and icons perform unexpected cameos. The macabre joke of a jester. Never more.

A 2008 documentary and debut feature film of Bafta-Award nominated director Jamie Jay Johnson. It follows the lives of the participants of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2007, specifically the entrants from Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Georgia. The film sees them proceed from the national finals that saw them crowned the representatives of their country through to the international song festival itself held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands where they each compete against 16 other acts.

Donostia-San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain, 2011. Maider, a filmmaker, moves to the very same flat where pedadogist Elbira Zipitria Irastorza (1906-1982) clandestinely established the first ikastola, a Basque school, under the harsh regime of dictator Francisco Franco. Despite of her pioneering work, developed throughout thirty years, her story is not well known, so Maider, intrigued, begins to research…

Richard Fairbrass goes behind the scenes of the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest.