Friday 25 February 2011

Pa negre / Black Bread (2010)



Director: Agustí Villaronga
Screenwriter: Agustí Villaronga, based on the book by Emili Teixidor
Cast: Francesc Colomer, Marina Comas, Nora Navas, Roger Casamajor, Laia Marull, Eduard Fernández, Sergi López.
Availability: the film is due out on DVD (with optional English subtitles) in Spain in March, and is currently available on the streaming site Filmin, here.

The silent knowledge of unquiet graves necessarily produced a devastating schism between public and private memory in Spain’ –Helen Graham (2005: 137)

Monday 14 February 2011

The 25th Goya Awards: the winners

At the moment the official website for the Goyas seems to be inaccessible -when I'm able to get onto it, I'll add some links here. In the meantime -
El País has the full list of winners here
Fotogramas have photogalleries of the red carpet, the show, the winners, and video footage.
Pa negre was the big winner, winning 9 Goyas out of 14 nominations including Best Film, Best Director, and 4 of the acting categories. The other frontrunners fared less well –También la lluvia (13 nominations) picked up 3 (Supporting Actor, Music, and Production Direction), as did Buried (Sound, Editing, Original Screenplay), and Balada triste de trompeta won 2 of its 15 categories (Make-Up and Special Effects).
The main categories were as follows:

Álex de la Iglesia’s Goya speech, 13th February 2011:

Someone has probably already translated this somewhere, and Alt Film Guide has a condensed version here, but this is my translation based on the transcript that El País put online almost immediately after the speech was given (they also have video). Please let me know if there are any errors (there were a couple of phrases I was unsure of).

Thursday 10 February 2011

Resources: where to buy / watch / read about Spanish cinema

Films and DVDs –
      The UK distribution of Spanish films on DVD has improved in the last few years, and there are a number of options in terms of buying them within the UK. Amazon UK currently has quite a lot of Spanish DVDs for under £5 (go into DVD > World Cinema > Spanish) and Moviemail also often have good offers on foreign language cinema. However there are a lot of Spanish films that don’t get released over here but are released in Spain with optional English subtitles (this is more true of contemporary films than older classics, but there is nonetheless a wide range available with subtitle options). If you’re unsure about ordering from Spain, there are quite a lot of Spanish sellers selling Spanish DVDs on ebay UK (DVDs > Foreign Language > Spanish) –the prices sometimes seem a little steep but consider that they quite often offer free postage and have factored that into their asking price (standard postage for one DVD being sent from Spain to the UK seems to be around 12€). I have ordered DVDs through ebay in this way and have never had any problem.