Castigats

The city of Madrid as it appears in the Spanish films of the 1950s. A small tribute to all those who filmed and portrayed Madrid despite the dictatorship, censorship and the critical situation of industry and society.

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.

Brigadistas

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.

"El campo para el hombre" was a politically militant documentary about the small holdings of land in the north of Spain and the large estates in the south of the country. This film portrays the exploitation and misery of the Spanish peasants, but also their class-consciousness and their will to fight for their rights and freedom. The film was shot in the late years of Franco's dictatorship, so it was made in secrecy (the directors were connected to the Spanish Communist Party).

A portrait of the actress and singer Pepa Flores, an incarnation of the recent history of Spain, who, in just twenty-five years of intense career, went from being Marisol, child prodigy of the Franco dictatorship, to being one of the first communist militants, icon of the Transition; an idol of the masses who became a discreet person after having claimed her right to remain silent.

In November 1936, a few months since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the government of the Second Republic moves to Valencia. In this situation, several Valencian artists and intellectuals decide to build four fallas — satirical plasterboard sculptures created to be burnt — to mock fascism.

Documentary produced by Falange and edited in Berlin, in response to the international success of the Republican production "Spain 1936" (Le Chanois, 1937).

¿Por qué morir en Madrid?

Spain, 1968. An analysis of the political and social situation of the country, suffocated by the boot of General Franco's tyrannical regime. (Filmed clandestinely in Madrid and Barcelona during the spring of 1968.)

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

Between October 1937 and November 1952 hundreds of Republican supporters took to the mountains of Asturias with two main objectives: to save their lives, and to continue their armed resistance against Franco. Many of them would die in those mountains. This film is centered on filming the places in the present where the major figures of the Asturian Guerrilla Group were killed.

A walk through the golden age of Spanish exploitation cinema, from the sixties to the eighties; a low-budget cinema and great popular acceptance that exploited cinematographic fashions: westerns, horror movies, erotic comedies and thrillers about petty criminals.

During the Franco regime, the prisons are filled with thousands of people with artistic ideals.

At the beginning of World War II, a mineral became necessary for the German state: wolfram. Galicia became “El Dorado” for many people who were looking for easy money and/or work in those hard years of the Spanish postwar. Miners, adventurers, guerrillas, civil guards, political prisoners, etc., lived together in the Galician mountains and intertwined their lives. This is the story of those people told by themselves.

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.

Documentary in which ten republican women remember their time in Franco's prisons. “Some put wedges in her nails; my sister-in-law has currents on her fingers and nipples; some have been raped”; “Since they hit first and then ask questions, they hit me.” “Baby, they have given us the death penalty. I told him: but, Virtudes, they will commute you!". These are some of the testimonies of ten Republican women in Franco's prisons that Tomasa Cuevas, a former member of the Communist Party, collected on an old recorder hidden in her bag so that they would not be lost in oblivion.

A documentary made with homemade videos of the spanish exiled due to the dictatorship in Spain from 1939 to 1977.

Equipo Crónica. Arte de trinchera

Born in Campo de Criptana, a small village in the Spanish region of La Mancha, Sara Montiel (1928-2013) conquered Mexico, Hollywood, and the hearts of people. The recognition of an unparalleled professional career, an intimate dialogue with a tireless worker who took the stage at the age of twelve and never got off. A movie star who seduced millions of viewers around the world, a singer who reinvented a musical genre, a woman who broke the mold…