From Miguel Delibes, Mario Camus’s Los santos inocentes is an incisive, haunting portrait of the political connection between Franco’s fascism, the Church, and the feudalism of land barons in Spain’s countryside in the 1960s. Impoverished peasants Paco and Régula work for Pedro, who manages a vast rural estate. Their problems are real, unlike those in […]
Daily Archives: January 4, 2008
Because it has an air of fable or legend about it, La leggenda del santo bevitore somewhat resembles Orson Welles’s The Immortal Story (1968) or Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (1997). Some may even be reminded of Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951). Written, directed and edited by Ermanno Olmi, the film derives from […]
Victor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena reflects on fascist Spain. Two sisters, Ana and Isabel, eight and ten, live with their parents in a rural Castile community in 1940, shortly after the defeat of decency in the Spanish Civil War. Their parents are each in their own lives: their father intently experimenting with bees, […]
