• Goya Awards®

    Best Documentary, Best Editing
  • Mar de Plata Int'l Film Festival

    Best Feature
  • Cinema du Réel Doc Film Festival

    Grand Prize
  • Seville European Film Festival

    Grand Prize
  • Rotterdam Int'l Film Festival

  • L'Alternativa Film Festival

    Best Feature
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Spanish with English subtitles

Winner of two GOYA AWARDS®, The Year of the Discovery explores the contradictions lived in Spain in 1992. In this pivotal year, Spain celebrated both the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in Sevilla, presenting the country as an emerging new democracy to the international community. In the meantime, workers in Cartagena protested a threat to industrial jobs with an uprising that culminated in the burning of the regional parliament.

Shot on Hi-8 videotape entirely within a smoky bar in the city of Cartagena, through one-on-one interviews, complex split-screen compositions, and subtle manipulations of time, Luis López Carrasco’s documentary offers a vivid counternarrative to the official history; one in which industrial labor’s toll on the body and the brutal fracturing of communities testifies against a national mythology of progress.

 

Press

“What emerges is a prodigy: the artifact, not only documentary, more surprising and even essential that Spanish cinematography has produced in a long time.” – Luis Martínez, El Mundo

“The testimonies of Cartagena people who lived through the struggles of 1992, experiencing police brutality along with disillusionment with the neoliberal policies of the supposedly "socialist" government, are articulate, vivid and attractive.” – Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter

About the Director
Luis López Carrasco (Murcia, Spain, 1981) is a filmmaker and writer. In 2008 he co-founded Los Hijos, an experimental cinema and documentary collective. His work has been shown in numerous international film festivals like Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto, NYFF Film Society of Lincoln Center, BAFICI or Viennale, and contemporary art centers like Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Museo Guggenheim, Centre Georges Pompidou or ICA London.

Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Distrital Film Festival, Lima Independiente Film Festival, CGAI, and Arteleku dedicated monographic focus on Los Hijos work. European Film Festival Paliç awarded his career with the Underground Spirit Award. Their first feature-length film, Los Materiales, was awarded with the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Direction (Punto de Vista International Film Festival 2010) and International Jury’s Special Mention (FiD Marseille 2010). El Futuro, his first solo film, was premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival, screened in more than fifty international festivals, and awarded in BAFICI, Lima Independiente, Uruguay Winter Festival, and IBAFF.

He is also a producer of True Love (Ion de Sosa, 2011) and Sueñan los androides, (Ion de Sosa, 2014), which premiered in Berlinale 2015 and executive producer of Nuestra amiga la luna (Velasco Broca, 2016), premiered in Locarno International Film Festival. His short film Aliens premiered at the Locarno Festival and was awarded in Doxufest Kosovo, FIDOCS, Cinespagna Toulouse, and FICA. His second feature-length film, The Year of the Discovery, had its World premiere on IFFR Rotterdam.

Notes on Film

“I was born in the city of Murcia although I have lived in Madrid since I was eighteen. A large part of my childhood was spent visiting my paternal grandparents, who had ended up living in Cartagena for employment reasons. Cartagena is a military port which has rivalled the capital for a thousand years. When I was seven years old, we spent a day in class colouring a stencil of the recently inaugurated brand-new regional parliament. Its eclectic architecture was striking for the time and all the children enjoyed painting the stencil with garish colours. It was new and attractive and represented the maturity of Murcia as a Community deserving a Statute of Autonomy. The effigy of the façade was stamped on my mind while I was colouring it in. This is why I especially remember the day it was burned.

I was eleven at the time and, like the rest of the country, I was overcome with enthusiasm for the events of 1992, the year in which Spain was presented as a brand new modern country before the international community. I remember seeing the inauguration of the Olympic Games and feeling part of a future world economic power, as the news readers were saying in these last years of crisis, the image of a parliament burning came back to mind now that the Congress of Deputies has been surrounded by fencing and police for months.

When I asked my father, or mother, or my family in Murcia how they experienced the burning of our region’s parliament in the neighbouring city – the city where my grandparents lived – they looked at me questioningly. What was I talking about exactly? What year did I say this happened? Was I sure I did not invent this? For me, the burning of the autonomous parliament was the other side of 1992.”

– Luis López Carrasco, Director