The legend of an ancient and forgotten civilization lies buried beneath a large expanse of dunes. For more than a century, certain travelers have reached this remote and desolate territory looking for the traces of ancient inhabitants, the ruins of a city, or perhaps a sort of lost utopia. Ignorant of these myths and the romantic delusions of archaeologists and adventurers, a few men, barely visible among the sands, today inhabit in solitude that place facing the sea.

‘The Sea Stares at Us From Afar’ premiered at Berlinale Forum in 2017 and won the Best Documentary award at Tolouse Spanish Film Festival, the Best Feature Film award at L’Alternativa Film Festival in Barcelona and the De Luxe Award at Sevilla Film Festival.

http://nitroflare.com/view/B7714E11105C646/The.Sea.Stares.at.Us.from.Afar.2018.WEB.720p.AAC.2.0.x264-SaL.mkv

https://publish2.me/file/41e99c4b48984/The.Sea.Stares.at.Us.from.Afar.2018.WEB.720p.AAC.2.0.x264-SaL.mp4

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

Synopsis:
El futuro opens with the news, over a black background, of Felipe González’s recent electoral victory in 1982. A preamble before the camera moves into the heart of a party. However it only gives a distant, dull view of the dancing and flirting of the modern youth of that time. Amidst the alcohol, the constant music and conversations captured in passing –very often in an oblique way-, López Carrasco (from the Collective Los Hijos) gives the impression of time standing still, of progress halted by tedium, that crystallizes in the uneasy sensation summoned up by that future of the title. An eloquent end to the party and a dawn, 30 years later, that opens multiple doors for thinking.

http://nitroflare.com/view/590DF7B6AA303D1/El_futuro_%28Luis_Lopez_Carrasco%2C_2013%29.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/78E3013546D820F/El_futuro_%28Luis_Lopez_Carrasco%2C_2013%29.part2.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/929B88A5C47DFEF/El_futuro_%28Luis_Lopez_Carrasco%2C_2013%29.part3.rar

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:Hardcoded English

The first was filmed on the Day of the Dead at Madrid’s Almudena cemetery. Leaving the grounds, the police intercepted the producers. Part of their recordings was purposely blurred so as to not be used against those filmed on the grounds. The censorship defined this short film as “a nauseating movie.

*******

Sinopsis Crónica de la celebración del 1 de noviembre, Día de Difuntos, en la ciudad de Madrid.
Info Adicional Está filmada durante el día de difuntos en el cementerio civil de la Almudena (Madrid). Al salir del recinto la policía interceptó a los realizadores. Parte del material fue velado a propósito para evitar que fuera usado en contra de aquellos filmados en el interior. La censura definió este cortometraje como «una película nauseabunda».

http://nitroflare.com/view/B515D6B1F2FCF8A/Dia_de_los_muertos_.avi

Language:Spanish
Subtitles:None

An unnamed young man arrives in the foreign city of Strasbourg for reasons unstated. He waits at a hotel, visits a café, sketches passersby… Eventually his motives are revealed, but it is not a traditional narrative that Guerín is after so much as the urban experience of watching, waiting, absorbing. Out of these materials Guerín builds a spellbinding film that reminds us of cinema’s powerful ability to evoke the tugs of memory, desire and the transitory. An extraordinary city film, Sylvia almost entirely eschews dialogue to instead give a symphonic voice to the city itself through a rich and fully immersive soundtrack of urban sounds, explosions of music and strange

http://nitroflare.com/view/37895E4F3188F14/Unas_fotos_en_la_ciudad_de_Sylvia_%28Guerin__2007%29.Intertitles_in_french.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/13E18F31F2D56BA/Unas_fotos_en_la_ciudad_de_Sylvia_%28Guer%C3%ADn%2C_2007%29_-_ENG_SUBS.srt

Language:Silent
Subtitles:Intertitles in french,English srt

Quote:
The spirit of youth and the thirst for knowledge are palpable in Júlia ist, which was written by four screenwriters – the director herself,– Pol Rebaque (also director of photography), Marta Cruañas (also producer), and María Castellvi – who adapted the story to their modest production means. Shot in Berlin and Barcelona, the film stars Elena Martín herself who, despite having trained in theatre, has shown with this film and Las amigas de Ágata that she has a telegenic face and a particular skill at conveying the fears, anxieties and confusions of the “Skype generation”.

The Júlia of the title, an architecture student, travels to the German capital for Erasmus. She leaves behind her protective family and her boyfriend, Jordi, who she has been with for a long time, the victim of routine. In her big and short-sighted eyes, Berlin is a Paradise where she can start a new life, full of new stimuli. But it won’t be like that: the big city turns out to be cold, unapproachable, dark and slightly hostile for anyone who doesn’t have a perfect mastery of its language or rhythms.

At the same time, through the conversations she has with him in front of her computer screen, the cracks in her relationship with Jordi start to show: distance is the test they had to undergo to guarantee their future together. Faced with her new and baffling life, Júlia has no choice but to fight, move forwards and survive, unearthing the most cheerful sides of the city and experimenting, for the first time, with something similar to freedom, without family or emotional ties.

Elena Martín has imbued her first film with personal experience, filling it with friends who she turned into actors and partners of a piece that was filmed in an absolutely free and fluid way, by small teams made up of four or five people. After months of sporadic filming, Elena Martín and her study companions managed to use a film that is a small-scale production but enormous in its meaning and emotions to shape a story that shows us what it means to leave behind every home comfort to explore another culture, facing responsibilities, fears and uncertainty, in search of personal growth. Even if, retracing her steps (in Barcelona, in this case), the feeling of huge failure can resurface… and with it the desire to settle down.

http://nitroflare.com/view/93C9FA7D819BA7A/Elena_Martin_-_%282017%29_Julia_ist.mkv

Language(s):Catalan, German, Spanish, English
Subtitles:English

Synopsis
Portabella’s first feature, co-scripted by poet Joan Brossa, became one of the most influential works of the Barcelona avant-garde, although like all his early films, it circulated only in an underground fashion. Eschewing dialogue, the director constructs a non-narrative story in fragments that reveal the daily lives of an adulterous couple interspersed with a cryptic stream of unrelated imagery. The title of this homage to directors including Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman, and Buñuel refers to the 29 “black years” of the Franco dictatorship.

http://nitroflare.com/view/09A1F3A9439F016/Nocturno.29.1968.1080p.MUBI.WEB-DL-Sammahel.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/2C1F02B2E33E3CE/Nocturno.29.1968.1080p.MUBI.WEB-DL-Sammahel.srt

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

Desert in your mind is the first feature movie directed, written and produced by Marta Grimalt Canals. This surrealistic road movie is filmed in super 8 bw around California, Barcelona and Mallorca.

Through his frustrations, an obsessed novelist connects with a dimension where a walking girl encounters weird characters in a mysterious urban world, slowly driving to the peaceful nature of the desert. In this trip between light and shadow, hope for finding an inner mental peace will prevail.

This movie is characterized for an experimental language, with purposed technical and performing imperfections, wrapped in an organic fantasy effect.
————————
Desierto en tu mente es el primer largometraje dirigido, escrito y producido por Marta Grimalt Canals. Esta road movie surrealista está filmada en super 8 bn alrededor de California, Barcelona y Mallorca.

A través de sus frustraciones, un novelista obsesionado conecta con una dimensión en la que una chica caminante se topa con pintorescos personajes en un misterioso mundo urbano, conduciendo poco a poco hacia la naturaleza pacífica del desierto. En este viaje entre luces y sombras, prevalecerá la esperanza para encontrar una paz mental interior.

La película está caracterizada por un lenguaje experimental, con expresas imperfecciones técnicas y de actuación, envuelto en un efecto orgánico de fantasía.

http://nitroflare.com/view/37FAD8EDC9601D0/Desierto.en.tu.mente.2017.Marta.Grimalt.1080p.WEBRip.AAC.x264.RIYE.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/4B5CCB7ACE48F6A/Desierto.en.tu.mente.2017.Marta.Grimalt.1080p.WEBRip.AAC.x264.RIYE.eng.srt
http://nitroflare.com/view/2E57F43B2D0A943/Desierto.en.tu.mente.2017.Marta.Grimalt.1080p.WEBRip.AAC.x264.RIYE.spa.srt

Language(s):Spanish, Catalan, English
Subtitles:English, Spanish (srt)

Quote:
The closing act of the New York Film Festival, and one of the season’s most rewarding films, Talk to Her strikes a variety of chords: It’s uproarious, whimsical, sad, preposterous–sometimes sequentially, sometimes all at once. The one-time provocateur and lover of garish pop culture shows a growing maturity in this film, mining darker, more emotionally resonant territory that gets deep under the skin even as its loopy unpredictability makes it wildly entertaining. At issue here are loneliness, loss, communication, male friendship, and the different forms love takes, all embodied with the wacky imagination for which Pedro Almodžvar is noted.

The plot, when described, has as much plausibility as a telenovela on acid, but here goes. Following a chance encounter at a performance of a Pina Bausch dance piece, two men, Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti), meet again at a private clinic where Benigno works as a nurse. He’s caring for Alicia (Leonor Watling), a ballerina rendered comatose by a car accident. And as chance would have it in the world according to Pedro, Marco is visiting another comatose patient, girlfriend Lydia (Rosario Flores), a bullfighter who was horribly gored in the ring. During this period of suspended time in the clinic, the lives of the four characters fluidly play out through titled flashbacks and forwards (‘Benigno and Alicia,’ etc.), cut with present scenes of the two men’s burgeoning friendship. Benigno pursues the logical culmination of his passion for his comatose patient. She’s found to be pregnant. Benigno’s imprisonment leads to a heart-rending denouement, as Alicia, Sleeping Beauty-style, awakens, and the narrative pirouettes into a hopeful future.

The film’s richness comes, in part, from a tapestry of art and performance that includes bullfighting (and a fascinating glimpse of Lydia the toreador getting kitted up before the fight), dance, and a song sung live by Brazilian superstar Caetano Veloso. And rather than assault viewers with a scene of sex with a comatose partner, Almodovar has devised the brilliant device of The Shrinking Lover, a hilarious black-and-white silent film-within-the-film that obliquely predicts the event and refracts a distasteful act through burlesque comedy.

Benigno (for ‘benign’) and his passionate devotion to Alicia, on whom he lavishes such loving care, remains one of Almodžvar’s most indelible portraits. A virginal innocent who lives in a parallel universe by his own rules, he manages to make do and even find joy with so very little. Before Alicia, his life was devoted to caring for his crochety, ailing mother; now his love object can’t speak or respond. But as Benigno says, in a line both
droll and heart-rending, ‘We get along better than most married people.’

Through Benigno, Almodžvar suggests that love can be nourished by the most barren sources–indeed, is largely a product of the imagination. Perhaps he’s also mischievously proposing that knocked-out (and acquiescent) is how men would prefer to have their women. And, for ‘communication’ to flourish, it’s actually desirable for one partner to be silenced. He’s saying, too, that barring the usual dialogue, a lover’s monologue is an equally valid form of communication. But perhaps the film’s emotional fuel comes from the never explicitly examined love between Benigno and Marco, which hauntingly continues to flower, fairy-tale-style, with the plot’s final turn.

Open-ended and composed of layer upon layer, Talk to Her is a cinephile’s feast, an invitation to countless interpretations.

http://nitroflare.com/view/E76BB885F0D61E0/Pedro_Almodovar_-_%282002%29_Talk_to_Her.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

This is a curious and little-known film from Saura’s best period. Co-scripted by Rafael Azcona, the film is virtually a two-hander about a husband and wife (Per Oscarsson and Geraldine Chaplin) discovering role playing to supplement their apparently repressed sex life and going a little bit too far. There is a shade of Virginia Woolf here, and more than a shade of the later Buñuel (who learned most of his tricks from Azcona, anyway). However, what Buñuel does with a sledge-hammer and schoolboy glee, Saura does with subtlety and bitter irony.

http://nitroflare.com/view/FE73BFCA9B1B2F9/La_madriguera_%281969%29_DVDRip-kg.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/D074866B4448DE5/La_madriguera_%281969%29_DVDRip-kg.srt

Language:Spanish (song in French)
Subtitles:English

Quote:
Harshly treated by the critics on release, of Pedro Almodovar’s work, Kika is perhaps the one that most benefits from re-viewing and re-assessment.

The story of Kika (an astonishing Veronica Forque), a Madrid makeup artist whose relationship with Ramon (Alex Cassanovas) leads to criminal schemes involving Kika’s maid Juana (Rossy DePalma), Jauan’s amorous, criminal brother Pablo (Santiago Lajusticia) and Ramon’s youth-obsessed father Nicholas (Peter Coyote). Overseeing it all is the muckraking, reality tabloid television show presided over by the formidable Andrea Scarface (a uniquely attired Victoria Abril).

Attracting controversy because of the scene in which Almodovar depicts Kika’s rape at the hands of Pablo with humorous detachment, the scene has since come to be more popularly viewed as further evidence of the director’s tribute to the power of women.

http://nitroflare.com/view/C7A31DCF5D7977C/Pedro_Almodovar_-_%281993%29_Kika.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:None

Quote:
Oriol and Yolanda live in Paris with their two daughters. He is an architect, she is a teacher. An accident while on holidays in the Ebro Delta changes their lives.

http://nitroflare.com/view/F658D899DE0E0FA/Jaime_Rosales_-_%282012%29_Dream_and_Silence.mkv

Language:Spanish, French, Catalan, English
Subtitles:Spanish, Catalan, English (optional)

Synopsis:
‘A man gets trapped inside a telephone box. Onlookers unsuccessfully try to free him. Then the men from the telephone company arrive, but relief turns into puzzlement, then horror, as it transpires what they have in store for him.’
– Donald Fisk

http://nitroflare.com/view/1B6375D3AD6625F/La.cabina.1972.DVDRip.x264.AC3.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/B2CBC5E529D4A49/La.cabina.1972.DVDRip.x264.AC3.srt

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

Description: ALL Don Anselmo wants is a motorized wheelchair. The problem is that there’s nothing wrong with his legs, and his prosperous but parsimonious son, the lawyer, refuses to indulge him. The drastic steps the old fellow takes to stop walking and start riding constitute the plot of ”El Cochecito” (”The Little Coach”), Marco Ferreri’s 1960 movie, which is having its American premiere at Film

Mr. Ferreri is best known for ”La Grande Bouffe,” a satire about Franco’s Spain in which several gourmands dine themselves to death. ”El Cochecito,” too, has its satiric edge -almost everybody, even likable Anselmo, is utterly self-centered; when Anselmo goes out of his way to reunite a pair of young lovers, it’s an aberration. You’ll need patience, but as the little tale develops, the movie offers a quirkily rueful look at the loneliness and longings of age.

Don Anselmo, played most cunningly by Jose Isbert, wants the motorized wheelchair so he can go buzzing around town with his invalid pal Don Lucas and join in the races for the handicapped. Since his wife’s death, Anselmo has been drifting pointlessly about the big crowded apartment that serves as home for his extended family and offices for his son and son-in-law. For him, it’s just a way station to the cemetery. The motorized wheelchair promises freedom.

It takes a while, almost half the movie, for Mr. Isbert to work his manic charm and the story to come into focus. As the plot veers this way and that, like one of the wheelchairs on a first outing, you may find yourself wondering what Mr. Ferreri is up to; some of the encounters are so casual as to be perplexing. The black-and-white movie seems to be fighting itself – black humor clashing with light sentiment.

But Anselmo and the others grow on you. The pleasures here lie in the vividness of the characters, never caricatures. The family members, grumpy Don Lucas, the bossy servant to a rich invalid, the avuncular wheelchair salesman, the shrewd woman to whom Anselmo sells his late wife’s jewels – they’re all real people in real places. And by the end, the chuckles of recognition have built up to cheers for Anselmo’s desperate defiance. Road Warrior EL COCHECITO, directed by Marco Ferreri; screenplay by Mr. Ferreri and Rafael Azcona; cinematography by Juan Julio Baena; music by Miguel Asins Arbo and Mr. Ferreri; produced by Pedro Portabella. Released by Kino International Corporation. At Film Forum 2, 57 Watts Street.

(Review taken from www.movies.nytimes.com)

http://nitroflare.com/view/BDB306F0966ED92/Marco_Ferreri_-_El_cochecito_%28La_petite_voiture%29.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/0C4243932BD7509/Marco_Ferreri___El_cochecito.en.srt

Spanish srt:
www.opensubtitles.org/fr/download/sub/3094553

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

Synopsis:
As in Vampir-Cuadecuc, this film turns on two basic axes: the inquiry into ways of cinematographic representation and a critical image of official Spain at the time of the Franco dictatorship. “Montage of attractions” and Brechtianism in strong doses. Umbracle is made up of fragments (some are archive footage) that resound rather than progress by unusual links, with dejá vu scenes that promise us more but remaintensely unfinished. Jonathan Rosenbaum said: “few directors since Resnais have played so ruthlessly with the unconscious narrative expectations to bug us”. Learning from the feeling of strangeness caused by Rossellini as he threw well known actors into savage scenery in southern Europe.

Portabella makes Christopher Lee wander around a dream-like Barcelona. Without a doubt Portabella’s most structurally complex and most profoundly political film, that is ferociously poetic.

— pereportabella.com

Review:
During the filming of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), experimental filmmaker Pere Portabello was engaged to direct a making-of documentary, titled Cuadecuc, vampir (1971), and sometime before, during, or after, it seems star Christopher Lee was snagged to appear in a few scenes which Portabello edited into a feature film.

Made in 1970 but released in 1972, Umbracle begins with has a zoological attendant checking the ground-level gallery and seeing Lee strolling and meticulously gazing at the pickled and mounted creatures, while the soundtrack features undulating female voices that waver in harmony and synchronicity. Once outside, Lee, with slicked back hair and stylish sunglasses, buys a cigar from a merchant, and as he lights it, spots a man dragged into a car and taken away.

We then follow a man as he seats himself in front of a woman (Jeannine Mestre, cast as one of Count Dracula’s child-eating vixens) on a moving passenger train, and stares her down after the train enters a dark mountain tunnel.

Portabello returns to a regurgitation of Lee’s scenes in the museum and the street abduction before he launches into a series of on-camera monologues where (presumably) Spanish directors read guidelines of the Do’s and Don’t’s of filmmaking as codified by the Franco government. We then pick up with the woman buying shoes in a modish shop set to what sounds like a track from the Mike Curb Congregation, during which Portabello intercuts to excerpts from a war film in which a priest has flashbacks before engaging in a battle.

A pair of clowns perform a routine on an empty stage, after which Lee reappears on stage and sings a set of German and French songs before giving a dramatic reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” Portabello then cuts to a moody, dramatic sequence where Lee beds Mestre, after which the director intercuts Lee walking the street with a montage of slapstick excerpts featuring Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, and the audio track with layered utterances of ‘Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do.’

Not unlike surrealist filmmaker Fernando Arrabal (Viva la muerte), Portabello films animal killings in a sequence that’s prolonged for shock value: chickens being uncrated, hung from a conveyor, killed, and processed. The grisliest moments (not for the squeamish) show close-ups of the birds being bled from the mouth while a Mike Curb version of a Carpenter’s “Close to You” gently flows on the soundtrack.

The film’s finale consists of Lee being interrupted by a stranger while reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and two sequences that reveal Portabello’s playfulness and firm grasp of dramatic (and surreal) mood: Lee’s final footage has him seated in a living room apartment while the camera tracks eerily backwards, ever so slowly down the front door hallway, and the only sound is an increasingly urgent knocking / pounding at the door. It’s an unnerving moment that visually noir, but sonically evocative of some indie murder thriller where violence is about to explode.

The more playful secondary sequence has Mestre spinning a Beethoven record, and as she sits down and dials the phone, the music gets stuck in a rut. What initially resembles repeated and rewound footage of Mestre dialing, picking up / down the receiver is just acting, allowing for Portabello’s camera to zoom in and hover around the actress, so while it visually resembles a 1920s exercise in surrealism, it’s also a small masterpiece of technical creativity, relying on performance rather than editing to achieve a human caught in a skipping groove.

Like Cuadecuc, vampir, Portabello uses high contrast B&W film and has the light levels blow out, resembling solarized video. The effects are extremely arresting, especially when he passes under tree branches. These visual similarities with vampire lead one to believe the high contrast imagery is less of a homage to Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, and just of Portabello’s own eccentric style.

— Mark R. Hasan (KQEK.com)

http://nitroflare.com/view/F70885727F790C3/Umbracle_%281970%29_–_Pere_Portabella.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/58A886754C79EE3/Umbracle_%281970%29_–_Pere_Portabella.part2.rar

Language(s):English, Spanish
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish (muxed)

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Plot :
Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is a New York City rare-book dealer motivated solely by financial gain. Wealthy book collector Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) hires Corso to authenticate his recently acquired copy of the seventeenth-century author Aristide Torchia’s book The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, reputedly a version of a book whose author was the devil himself. The book contains nine engravings that, when correctly interpreted and the legends properly spoken, will raise the Devil. Since two other copies exist, Balkan suspects that the book might be a forgery, and asks Corso to travel to Europe determine whether his or any of the other two are genuine and, if so, to acquire them for Balkan, at any cost or by any means.

Balkan’s copy of The Nine Gates had previously belonged to bibliophile Andrew Telfer, who committed suicide soon after selling the book to Balkan. Moreover, Telfer’s widow, Liana (Lena Olin), wants the book back, as Telfer originally bought the book for her. Liana seduces Corso but fails to re-acquire her book. Meanwhile, Corso’s business partner and rare-book shop owner, Bernie (James Russo), whom Corso had asked to hide the book, is murdered and his corpse disposed to reflect one of the engravings in The Nine Gates, which, as in the image of the The Hanged Man Tarot card, shows a man hanged by one foot upside down.

Corso travels to Toledo, Spain, to talk with the Ceniza brothers (José López Rodero), twin-brother book restorers, who point out to him three of the book’s engravings signed “LCF”, which, with their prompting, Corso understands means that Lucifer himself designed and cut them. Corso next goes by train to Sintra, Portugal, and visits Victor Fargas (Jack Taylor), in a mysterious house (the main house of Quinta da Regaleira), whose copy of The Nine Gates Corso compares with Balkan’s. To his surprise, he discovers that the signature “LCF” is, in the Fargas copy, found in three different engravings, which vary in detail from their counterparts in the Balkan copy. The next morning, a mysterious young woman (Emmanuelle Seigner) who has crossed paths with Corso since Balkan summoned him for this assignment awakens Corso and leads him back to Fargas’s house to find the old man murdered and the engravings ripped out of his copy of The Nine Gates. Later, the unnamed woman displays supernatural abilities in rescuing Corso from Liana’s bodyguard (Tony Amoni).
In Paris, Corso visits examines the Baroness Kessler (Barbara Jefford), owner of the third copy of The Nine Gates, The Baroness initially refuses any contact with Corso once she realizes who his employer is, but Corso returns and intrigues Kessler — a lifelong devotee of the study of the book — with evidence that the engravings differ between the copies. Having gained access to Kessler’s copy, he records three further differences; later, Kessler is killed, and the engravings from her book also ripped out. Now believing that each copy of The Nine Gates is genuine, Corso suspects that the secret to opening the nine gates is a combination of the ‘LCF’ versions of each of the nine engravings, distributed across all three copies of the book. Liana steals Balkan’s copy from Corso’s hotel room; he follows her to a mansion, and witnesses her using it in leading a Satanist ceremony. Suddenly, Balkan interrupts the ceremony, kills Liana, takes the engraving pages, and his own, intact, copy, and flees.
Concluding that Balkan likely killed Fargas and the Baroness, Corso pursues Balkan to a remote keep (which was depicted in a postcard Corso found in Kessler’s copy), and finds Balkan preparing to open the nine gates. After a struggle, during which Corso wields and then drops a pistol he took during an earlier confrontation, Balkan manages to trap Corso in a hole in the floor, thus immobilizing him and allowing Balkan to perform his summoning ritual unmolested (but with Corso as a ‘witness’.) Balkan recites a series of phrases related to each of the nine engravings, then douses the floor and himself with gasoline and sets it alight, believing himself immune to the flames. Balkan’s invocation, however, appears to fail, and Balkan begins screaming in agony as his body starts to burn. Corso frees himself and, with no alternative, puts Balkan out of his agony with a shot and escapes the fire. Outside the building, Corso encounters the mysterious unnamed woman and (possibly without any say in the matter) has sexual intercourse with her by the light of the flames. Later, she tells him that Balkan failed because the ninth engraving Balkan had used was a forgery. Corso, following her directions, returns to the Ceniza brothers’ shop. On arriving, he finds the store gone and the last piece of furniture being removed, from the top of which falls the final, authentic, engraving, which includes a likeness of the mystery girl. With the last engraving in hand, Corso returns to the castle it depicts and crosses the threshold of the Ninth Gate.

http://nitroflare.com/view/1D4EF3FB1864CFC/The_Ninth_Gate_%281999%29.BDRip%2Bcommentary.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/FD00D2960B00C9E/The_Ninth_Gate_%281999%29.BDRip%2Bcommentary.part2.rar

Second audio track : Director’s commentary.

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none

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Quote:
The Spanish Civil War has been considered one of the most horrendous events in the recent European history and has been depicted by a plethora of writers, philosophers and artists – Hemingway, Picasso and even Guillermo del Toro. But how much do we know about the thirty-five years General Franco ruled in Spain for? Under what conditions did Spaniards live in the 1940s and 50s, for example? This is a much obscure period, due mainly to Franco’s protectionist attitude towards international politics.

If we have a look at the films which were being produced in Spain at the time, we might be at first deceived by a few examples of what has been called (Franco’s) ‘Regime Cinema’ – el cine del Régimen – a series of purely entertaining works that not only avoided tackling the country’s sociopolitical situation but also encouraged escapism (El último cuplé, Tómbola, El pequeño ruiseñor…). If we have a deeper look though, we can see how other not so widely known films dared to challenge the Spanish Establishment of the time. Calle Mayor, written and directed by openly communist director Juan Antonio Bardem is a clear example of this more subversive cinema.

The film starts with an overview of a town. An anonymous narrator tells us this is just a normal town, like there are many others. We follow the camera’s movement until it reaches the ‘calle Mayor’ – the town’s main street. We are introduced to Juan and his friends, who belong to the local middle class. In order to mitigate the boredom produced by the lack of amenities they drink, sing and plot distasteful pranks against other fellow citizens. The group targets sanctimonious spinster Isabel (Betsy Blair) as their next victim. Juan is then challenged to seduce naïve Isabel whose only hope in life is to get married. Isabel falls in love with Juan with a melodramatic passion which seems more appropriate for a teenage girl than a thirty-five year old woman. Realising at one point that the joke has gone too far, Juan turns to his friend Federico (Yves Massard) who wisely advises him to confess the truth to Isabel. Juan is then morally forced to make a decision whose consequences will turn everyone’s lives upside down.

Calle Mayor is a highly influential film still today. Based on the play La señorita de Trévelez by Carlos Arniches, it offers a very bleak vision of provincial society in Spain during Franco’s rule. We helplessly witness Juan and Isabel’s inevitable downfall and eventual social alienation. Meanwhile, the cruel and cunning pranksters never receive any punishment nor are even pointed at as guilty once in the film. They succeed somehow, and get away with it.

Juan Antonio Bardem’s vision of the society of his time was grim, especially when focusing on the – back then new-born – middle classes. This vision was also shared by other Spanish film directors such as Luis García Berlanga (Plácido, 1961) and Luis Buñuel (Le Charme Discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972) who also criticised the privileged classes in their works. — R. MARTÍNEZ (Spanish Film Review Club)

http://nitroflare.com/view/7528C9241D8916F/MainStreet1956.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/25F6872CD365D3A/MainStreet1956.part2.rar

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

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One of the unknown Gatlif movies, a short one.
Best Short Film – Fiction (Meilleur court métrage de fiction)- Cesar 1983

Gatlif plays himself in this one…pretty nice to see the guy that made Vengo (another great one!) dancing in a red shirt…

http://nitroflare.com/view/7D23ABC6E130AFA/1983_-_Canta_Gitano.avi

English srt:
https://subscene.com/subtitles/canta-gitano/english/1160995

Language:a bit of spanish (molto cantabile)
Subtitles:English

SYNOPSIS:
Man has shepherded his flock since the beginning of time, so long in fact that the nomadic shepherd has become part of our collective consciousness. Joan Pipa is the last in the line of a millenarian tradition on the verge of extinction. We accompany him on his last trek through the Catalan Pyrenees and as the days go by we discover the past and present of a man who loves his way of life and exudes the pleasure of life at one with nature. In recent years however, rural depopulation, industrialization, construction on an unparalleled scale, the proliferation of new roads and infrastructure and climate change have combined to put an end to a dream. Where do we go from here? Is the disappearance of nomadic shepherds a sign of progress, or are we witnessing the death of our civilization?

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:
Making this film was a vital experience for me. By painting the portrait of a free man, I have tried to sketch an outline of humanity itself. I walked by his side, scrutinising his face, his hands, his feet, listening to the words he spoke, sharing his intimacy and his authenticity. “A dream” was conceived as a cinematographic poem, a search for my own visual language within simplicity, aesthetically pure ans stripped of all artifice. I would like to transmit the sensorial richness of nature, and to evoke the absolute beauty and the immense frailty of humankind and the world in which we live.

http://nitroflare.com/view/8F907C7F6BF2B5F/El_somni__Christophe_Farnarier__2008_.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/C6DB5937CF6C555/El_somni__Christophe_Farnarier__2008_.part2.rar

Language(s):Catalan
Subtitles:None

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Plot Synopsis [AMG]
Widely regarded as a masterpiece of Spanish cinema, this allegorical tale is set in a remote village in the 1940s. The life in the village is calm and uneventful — an allegory of Spanish life after General Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. While their father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) studies bees in his beehive and their mother (Teresa Gimpera) writes letters to a non-existent correspondent, two young girls, Ana (Ana Torrent) and Isabel (Isabel Telleria), go to see James Whale’s Frankenstein at a local cinema. Though they can hardly understand the concept, both girls are deeply impressed with the moment when a little girl gives a flower to the monster. Isabel, the older sister, tells Ana that the monster actually exists as a spirit that you can’t see unless you know how to approach him. Ana starts wandering around the countryside in search of the kind creature. Instead, she meets an army deserter, who is hiding in a barn. The film received critical accolades for its subtle and masterful use of cinematic language and the expressive performance of the young Ana Torrent.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/8EBC4FD0A91EF79/the.spirit.of.the.beehive.1973.criterion.dvdrip.xvid.ac3-ostermann.cd1.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/D8F79F8EFDBC0B5/the.spirit.of.the.beehive.1973.criterion.dvdrip.xvid.ac3-ostermann.cd1.idx
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/1903760140C750F/the.spirit.of.the.beehive.1973.criterion.dvdrip.xvid.ac3-ostermann.cd1.sub
http://nitroflare.com/view/196729343F8DE83/The.Spirit.of.the.Beehive.1973.CRITERION.DVDRip.XviD.AC3-OSTERMANN.CD2.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/E65FA7EBB06755F/the.spirit.of.the.beehive.1973.criterion.dvdrip.xvid.ac3-ostermann.cd2.idx
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/7FB4035073E687D/the.spirit.of.the.beehive.1973.criterion.dvdrip.xvid.ac3-ostermann.cd2.sub

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

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Again, it is a portrait of a woman and it gives us another glimpse of an exceptional figure. Mézières comes across as an outstanding actress, offering her body and her sufferings with a rare and profoundly moving abandon. Although the action of the film unfolds over five years, charting the development of a painful relationship between a mother and her daughter, the basic principle is to draw it all together rather than follow a psychological chronology. The relationship is apprehended as a single entity: the cracks are evident, but there is not too much emphasis on the process of disintegration. The story divides into two distinct time periods, first with mother and daughter together in the same bohemian setting, then separated by society, each facing her own choices and wanderings. However, the purpose of this time division is not so much to answer the predictable question “What will become of them?” in preparation of a pointless debate on “How can a girl live without her mother?” (and vice versa), as to show the metamorphosis of a single body, a dual mother-daughter identity, which is treated in the film less as a social couple going through ups and downs than as a single female figure with two faces. The beauty of the film lies in this constant blending of the two personalities, an on-going role-play in mother/daughter boundaries resulting in a disturbing tension between incestuous bond and transfer of identity.

1,02GB | 01:40:18 | 704×384 | avi

http://nitroflare.com/view/31ADEF8088B25D1/Fleursdesang2002.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/6F8F0304F7B56F4/Fleursdesang2002.part2.rar

Language:French
Subtitles:German (idx/sub)

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