Carrasca

Alejandro Cortés Calahorra / Spain / 2018 / 70 min
Carrasca_Poster_Landscape Eng_1200 Carrasca_Still 03_1200 Carrasca_Still 05_1200 Carrasca_Still 08_1200
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  • Huesca International Film Festival

  • SEMINCI Valladolid International Film Festival

  • Madrid Film Festival

    Audience Award

  • Bogota International Film Festival

  • Buñuel-Calanda International Film Festival

    Best Feature Film

  • Simón Awards of the Aragonese Film Academy

    Best Music

  • Beloit International Film Festival

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Synopsis

Spanish with English subtitles

With Teresa Ramón

Directed by Alejandro Cortés Calahorra, Carrasca is a powerful documentary road movie that serves as both an artistic manifesto and an intimate portrait of Spanish painter Teresa Ramón. Blending elements of tragedy, black humor, and poetic realism, the film traces Ramón’s five-decade journey through the art world—a path marked by creative defiance, personal sacrifice, and spiritual rebirth.

As she travels through emotionally and physically charged landscapes, Ramón reflects on her near-death experience and the profound impact it had on her art and identity. Carrasca is not only a meditation on the transformative power of creativity, but also a critical examination of gender, aging, and resilience in a male-dominated cultural sphere. Through her evocative narrative and visual symbolism, Ramón invites viewers into the raw interior of the creative process, offering a compelling case for art as survival, resistance, and radical self-expression.

Related Subjects
About the Director
Alejandro Cortés Calahorra is a film director and member of the Spanish Film Academy. He premiered his films Refugios (Argentina/Spain) and Carrasca (Spain) at international festivals across Europe, Asia, and America, as well as in cinemas, on television, and on streaming platforms. He is currently developing the films Made in 1999 and Perro Viejo.

After studying Direction at the prestigious Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, he specialized in Screenwriting, Documentary, and Animation in Argentina and Spain, and in Series Screenwriting in Cannes, France (Université Côte d’Azur & DFFB Serial Eyes Berlin).

Cortés Calahorra was the only Spanish writer selected for the Cannes Screenwriters’ Residency, Canneseries Unlimited. He was also a finalist in the Spanish Film Academy Residency; an IBERMEDIA Scholarship recipient at LabGuion Colombia; and has been selected for the Torino Film Lab, Iberseries Platino Industria Pitch (HBO Max, Sony, and Dopamine), 20th CIIF Canary Islands Film Market, 65th ZINEBI Networking, IsLABentura Canarias, and the Extremadura and Navarra Cinema Residencies, as well as Serieslab SGAE.

He also served as Director of Research and Documentation for the documentary Heroes: Silence and Rock & Roll (2021), centered on the music band Héroes del Silencio. The film was nominated for both the Goya and Forqué Awards.

Press

“Impeccable rhythm, a flawless script, superb technical workmanship and music that fills every image; Carrasca is a documentary about a great artist who has signed an increasingly solid and important filmmaker.” – Carmen Puyó, Heraldo de Aragón

“A personal road movie and a living testament from a veteran painter.” – El Periódico de Catalunya

“Beyond the labels, Carrasca is extraordinarily fertile in many facets of a life turned into a testament, which captures the exuberant personality of a woman, artist, mother, wife, and grandmother, who has survived in a world of men.” – Javier García Antón, El Diario de Huesca

“Carrasca is the female version of the oak, a tree gifted to withstand all kinds of attacks. Alejandro Cortés chose an unbeatable title to portray this woman expert in survival, both vital and professional. Teresa... has no filter. That, in someone like her, is a memorable spectacle. What grace, what depth and what truth. ” – Luis Alegre, Heraldo de Aragón

Notes on the Film

“Carrasca is a feature-length documentary by a fiction filmmaker who began his career as a painter. It is a return to the roots, exploring the struggles and renunciations that every artist must confront. For a woman artist—who is also a mother and grandmother, born under a dictatorship and in a deeply patriarchal society like mid-20th-century Spain—the journey is even more arduous. This is the story of Carrasca’s protagonist, veteran artist Teresa Ramón.

Her pride in how far she has come with her art is intertwined with the frustration of not having achieved it sooner, due to the family obligations imposed by her environment. These complex emotions, laced with humor and irony, unfold in a road movie that also serves as a living testament at the twilight of her life. But Teresa still has much to say. Carrasca reveals her talent, strength, and enduring spirit—like the hardy oak tree from which the film takes its name (carrasca, in the dialect of the Aragonese mountains), standing tall in the arid landscapes of northern Spain.”

– Alejandro Cortés Calahorra, Director

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