Arts / Spanish in the reel world

FEELING Spanish comes easily to the Spanish Film Festival’s producer Genevieve Kelly.

She’s an Aussie, but she has a Peruvian mum and a grandma who doesn’t speak English so, as she says: “Speaking Spanish is quite a natural thing”.

That’s handy, because if there’s one thing Australia’s 18-year-old Spanish Film Festival treasures, it’s the Spanish language.

Much of the publicity has been directed to the opening-night film, “Spanish Affair”, the biggest Spanish box office hit ever, but “CityNews” wanted to get to the heart of this event, so we looked at three wildly different films ahead of the event – “Tango Glories”, “Lasa & Zabala” and “Easy Sex, Sad Movies”.

“Lasa & Zabala” is a hard-hitting movie based on a real-life case where ETA terrorists are tortured and killed by Andalusian police.

“It’s an extremely sensitive issue,” says Kelly, choosing her words carefully.

“Those boys did undergo that interrogation as alleged terrorists, but then again they did, allegedly anyway, commit crimes against the Spanish… It’s a great film in that it does not take sides.”

Oddly, “Spanish Affair” deals with much the same issue in comedy, showing a young southerner striving to win the heart of a Basque girl.

The festival is not just confined to films made on the Iberian Peninsula. My own favourite, “Tango Glories,” is made in Argentina, although its ageing star, Héctor Alterio, lived in Spain for more than a decade. Replete with masculinity, but with a strong female character, it shows a disturbed former tango dancer who speaks and thinks only in tango songs.

The last of my three, “Easy Sex, Sad Movies”, is a collaboration between Spain, Argentina and France. A Buenos Aires screenwriter (played by Hector’s son, Ernesto Alterio) is hired to write a new romantic comedy, but art becomes life.

“It starts out looking like a fluffy romance and ends up on quite a realistic arc,” Kelly says approvingly.

But with 38 films on show, there’s more. For kids, there’s the animation “Dixie and the Zombie Rebellion” and the presence of the late Generalissimo Francisco Franco still bears down in “Marshland”, a web of murders set in 1980 in a backwater town where Franco’s attitudes are still entrenched.

Kelly’s favourite of all is the closing-night film, Argentine-Spanish black comedy “Wild Tales”, nominated for an Oscar and winner of one of Spain’s principal national film awards, the Goya, for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film.

“It’s about everyday people pushed to the absolute limit and it’s about revenge… so topical,” she says.

Spanish Film Festival, Palace Electric Cinema, April 23-May 6, full program spanishfilmfestival.com

 

 

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