La Maleta Mexicana
Sunday 7 October – 5 pm
Cinema Español
(Mexico 2011) 90 min. Dir: Trisha Ziff. International award winning film, La Maleta Mexicana tells the story of the recovery of 4,500 negatives by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David ‘Chim’ Seymour taken during the Spanish Civil War found 70 years later in a closet in Mexico City. The film looks at the journey of these negatives from France to Mexico; their survival and looks at how Spain reflects today on its own history as well as those who escaped. Mexico was the only country to come to the rescue and support of the Spanish Republic and then honour and support the Republic in exile when the rest of the world turned its back. La Maleta Mexicana looks at this unique story and these photos lost for seventy years. According to director Ziff – “I returned the negatives at a moment when, thirty years after the democratic transition, a progressive Spanish government finally felt secure enough to make ‘looking back’ both possible and legal. But this security proved false: when Judge Baltasar Garzón started a legal investigation of the Franco dictatorship, he was forced from office into political exile.”
This film is a mixture of Spanish and English interviews – if you speak either language you can follow the story it tells.
The English Surgeon
Sunday 14 October – 5 pm
(US-UK 2009) 93 min. Dir: Geoffrey Smith. The English Surgeon centers largely on Dr. Henry Marsh’s admirably generous charity work in Ukraine. He became involved in the Ukrainian medical world, he explains in a voice-over, when, after delivering a speech in that former Soviet satellite in 1992, he discovered the appalling state of one of its hospitals. It is, perhaps to state the obvious, unsettling if strangely reassuring to watch a skilled surgeon rummaging around the brain of another human being. Yet what resonates most deeply in this unexpectedly effective and often affecting documentary is not the whirring, grinding and wet noises of Marian’s operation or even the images of his brain pulsating under a window cut into his skull. It’s a quiet, quietly haunting scene in which the surgeons, their faces knotted and gray, struggle to find a way to tell a 23-year-old that she’s going to die. These men perform miracles, but they are also agonizingly human.
Original Version ( English and Ukrainian) with English subtitles.
A History of Violence
Sunday 21 October – 5 pm
Viggo Mortensen’s Birthday
(US-Canada 2005) 98 min. Viggo Mortensen, Mario Bello, William Hurt, Ed Harris. Dir: David Cronenberg. A soft-spoken man who runs a small-town luncheonette is suddenly confronted by two violent strangers – and is more than ready to respond. His actions lead to questions and repercussions. Sexually potent, harshly violent story based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke. A History of Violence is arresting entertainment that means to hit us right between the eyes – and it does.
Original version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
Dark Shadows
Wednesday 31 October – 7 pm
(USA 2012) 113 min. Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer. Dir: Tim Burton. Barnabas (Johnny Depp) has the world at his feet – or at least the town of Collinsport, Maine. The master of Collinwood Manor, Barnabas is rich, powerful and an inveterate playboy… until he makes the grave mistake of breaking the heart of Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). A witch, in every sense of the word, Angelique dooms him to a fate worse than death: turning him into a vampire, and then burying him alive. Two centuries later, Barnabas is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972. He returns to Collinwood Manor to find that his once-grand estate has fallen into ruin. Dark Shadows captures the grand sweep and often ridiculous theatricality of both soap operas and gothic romance.
Original Version (English) with Spanish subtitles.
All films are shown at the Nerja Culture Centre. More information on the Nerja Cine Club here.
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