For Spanish filmmaker, Irene Cardona, her recent film represents several firsts.  It’s the first feature film for Cardona. It’s the first time she has made the trip to the U.S. and it’s the first time that Cardona has experienced the Fall/Winter rain that is so common in Seattle.

Cardona’s first feature film, A FIANCE FOR YASMINA, has been described as a romantic comedy.  But it can also be considered a sociodrama as it deftly explores the relationship of a group of misfit characters in the south of Spain dealing with love, lust and friendship under a socio-economic backdrop. 

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Like a cross between Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy and Christy Brown in My Left Foot, “Cuajo” (slang for tadpole) is a scrawny touchy gimp who won’t let disability stand in the way of his dreams. In a poor section of Barcelona, he wants to be a rapper, to build his own recording studio where he and his best friend Adolfo can make music, never mind that he cerebral palsy. Bathing and walking are a struggle, yet perhaps for this reason, he’s the most enterprising hustler in the hood.

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Tonight’s opening night fiesta kicks off with Desperate Women (Enloquecidas), directed by Juan Luis Iborra. It’s a "hilarious and outrageous thriller" in which a young woman meets the man of her dreams, only to discover that he’s supposed to be dead. Ha! Spanish women don’t let a little thing like death stop them.

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After working 10 years in New York distributing independent films, Marta Sanchez saw that there was a lack of Spanish films in US movie houses. So five years ago she set out to change that by founding Pragda, an organization whose mission is to expose US audiences to a wider and more diverse pool of Spanish films.

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The company’s head of Pragda, promoter of the festival, stressed that the sample arrives to Miami because it is one of the major U.S. cities. Sanchez said that it is a good opportunity to see Spanish cinema in the city. She explained that the goal is to reach the American public, both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, of any background, because in general they barely know any Spanish film.

The festival, which includes eight films, will open tomorrow with "Shame" by David Planell, a drama about a young couple from Madrid which hosts a young Peruvian children with communication problems...

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The Spanish filmmaker Marta Sanchez is an advocate of utopia.  She knows very well about how to tackle a goal as it has achieved what to many seemed impossible five years ago: to bring Spanish cinema to America." Spanish cinema has to be treated as if it were independent, because the public that sees subtitled films is very limited," explains Sanchez, who has brought Spanish films not only to the United States but to other Latin American Countries and Europe.

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Spain (Un)Censored, an on-going film exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), showcases 20 Spanish films produced from 1951 tp 1979 that reveals the creative zest of film directors working under General Franco’s rule.  Their inventiveness not only helped them defy the tight scrutiny of the regime’s censors, but also produce masterpieces laden with irony and often mockery of the very society that bred them. (...)

Spanish Cinema Now continues its mixed bag of attractions with Shortmetraje, a program of seven short subjects of unusually diverse style, subject and length. I am not a particular fan of shorts, but this combination, gathered by film curator Marta Sanchez strikes me as about as interesting a blend as you’re likely to see in any 90-minute sitting.

Libra (yes, the astrological sign) begins the program on a brief, quizzical note, as a young woman faces her questioner and explains the problem she has with taking her final law exams. In only four minutes, writer/director Carlota Coronado and her two-person cast Helena Casteñeda and José Angel Egido manage to hold us rapt and then surprise us.

At the screening I attended, an audience favorite, garnering spontaneous applause, appeared to be Lucina Gil’s fourteen-minute The Happy Man.(...)

In its tongue-in-cheek illustration of misguided revolutionaries, Antoni Padrós’s Lock-Out suggests a rough hewn and metaphoric - if more impenetrable and decidedly uneven - precursor to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, interweaving episodes of straightforward narrative, dream-like interludes, and political manifesto into an abstract portrait of resistance and marginalization. For former finance worker Walter and his motley group of friends, ground zero for revolution is appropriately found in a salvage yard, where they have set up camp to pursue their own version of Francoist ideals to live off the land - albeit through recycling scrap materials rather than farming. Dropping out of society to lead a bohemian existence, the freedom they had hoped to find in the discarded rubble continues to elude them, their lives complicated by an unexpected pregnancy, romantic rivalries, and boredom. However, when their tedium is broken one day by the unexplained appearance of a handsome stranger who silently watches over them and refuses to leave, the friends decide to abandon their paradise and return to their former lives.

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There was a time in Spain that not all movies were deemed suitable for display in theaters, much less pass through Francoist censorship. It was documentary film, largely experimental, subversive, underground, done with little or no budget, and obviously without permits (the necessary approval that the government should give every movie before being filmed). These were anti-Franco films that aspired to expose the social and political realities of Spain, and the filmmakers had to record without asking anyone’s permission.  It was, in short, underground cinema and its authors were Catalans. (...)

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By Idoya Noian. As readers of David Foster Wallace know, one should not neglect the footnotes page, where treasures lie but often marginalized in world literature.  In film, something similar can happen, and at Lincoln Center in New York on Monday and Tuesday, the screen will be filled with Catalan films that were banned under Franco, a series of 11 films that may pose a sidenote in history Spanish cinema, but are gems of underground, radical, subversive and nonconformist material.

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By Isabel Lafont. Some travel to New York without really knowing what they are going to learn. And there are those who already have a clear idea what they are going to take back with them. Marta Sánchez (Madrid, 1971) wanted to know the secrets of independent distribution and was dedicated to the promotion of Spanish cinema in America. "For them, Spanish cinema is like independent film because the public exposure to subtitled films is very limited," she explains, glad that the gastronomy of Madrid is open to fusions such as Peruvian and Asian cuisine. As for fusion, of course, there is always the city of skyscrapers. Sanchez landed there in 1997 with her mission clear in her head. First she received a Masters in Cultural Business Management at New York University, then she gained experience working at Anthology Film Archives (the Film Library founded by Jonas Mekas), and MoMA, until she found her match: Women Make Movies, the largest distributor of films by women in the world. (....)

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Pace Mao, the revolution is, in fact, a dinner party, and the Catalan director Pere Portabella organized and filmed it in 1974. He gathered, at a rural villa, four men and a woman who had served jail terms, as political prisoners under the Franco regime, ranging from three to twenty-four years. The venue and the participants were unnamed, due to ongoing repression (the dinner took place the night of another political prisoner’s execution), which lends the clandestine meeting an intrinsic edge of drama. The evening begins with their review of a previously recorded debate about communes (which they endorse with a hedged, humane realism), but soon moves to the heart of the matter: table talk about incarceration and the forms of resistance it invokes. Portabella, a master of dark irony, catches the sombre activists reflecting on the efficacy of a hunger strike in fighting “the enemy” (they’re utterly aware that its sole value is the scandal that outside supporters can make of it). (...)

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