Huesca Film Festival

Catalogue
37th Edition
2009

1. The poster
2. Sponsors
3. Collaborations
4. Sites
5. Organisation
6. Awards
7. Countries
8. CD map

1. ESPAÑOL

Basilio
Martín Patino

Award Ciudad de Huesca

PLAYING WITH IMAGES:
THE FILMS OF BASILIO MARTÍN PATINO

• QUERIDÍSIMOS VERDUGOS
• MADRID
• EL GRITO DEL SUR: CASAS VIEJAS
• OJOS VERDES
• A LA SOMBRA DE LA ALHAMBRA
• ESPEJOS EN LA NIEBLA

IN COLLABORATION WITH:

Basilio Martín Patino was born in Lumbrales (Salamanca) in 1930. His first childhood memories, love affairs, wraths, joys and sorrows, his doubts and meditations were inevitably connected both to that Spanish (un)civil war he happened to live (suffer) and the subsequent gloomy years marked by fear and obscurity.

In his home town Salamanca and from its university he founded the University Film Club. Under his direction the National Film Talks (1955) took place. There in Salamanca people like Bardem, Berlanga, Fernán Gómez, Muñoz Suay or Antonio del Amo were discussing the poverty of Spanish cinema (among other things). Soon he moved to Madrid, where he entered the “official” school of cinema (in the specialty of film directing). At the IIEC, during the three years course, he madeEl descanso (1957), Parque del oeste (1958) and Tarde de domingo (1960), his graduation film in which he showed a spirit of renewal close to that of the “nouvelle vague”.

Two documentary films, El noveno (1960) and Torerillos (1960) already showed one of the paths he was going to follow in his later films: the (fictionalized) description of reality. He soon would experiment the freedom of shooting making numerous advertising short films. An excellent medium to discover new ways of expression, to master edition and to learn how to make the best use of space and time. His first full-length film was Nueve cartas a Berta (1965), a beautiful film document about a city suspended in time in which a young woman reflects on the world surrounding her.

Short films (Paseo por los letreros de Madrid, 1968), films for TVE he never finished and now lost (Rinconete y Cortadillo, 1968), all this led him to his second feature film, Del amor y otras soledades, 1969, encumbered by the censorship that prevented him from managing what he was trying: to analyze the conventional marriage in depth. The period that follows can be considered one of his greatest times as a director, as he made a series of films opposing to the industry and the censorship. He shot then several documentaries about the situation in Spain, by that time a broken country in the hands of its oppressors: Canciones para después de una guerra (made in 1971 but not premiered till 1976), Queridísimos verdugos (1973) and Caudillo (1974).

Some years passed until he made a “commercial” film. It was in 1985 when he made a sort of sequel to Nueve cartas a Berta, namely Los paraísos perdidos, which is the story of a frustrated hope.

Through all those years Patino didn’t remain silent. He made different jobs for several institutions, he collaborated in many commemorative exhibitions, he founded an illustrated cinematographic magazine (La nueva ilustración española), and he even was the promoter of probably the first experience of a “local” television station in Spain: a broadcasting emitted from the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.

In 1987 he made one of his best films, Madrid, although it is also one of the least known, in spite of the fact that it was awarded many prizes in several international festivals. His subsequent film, La seducción del caos (1991) made for TVE, won the prize to the best film for television at Cannes festival. A perfect combination of reality and fiction in a film which is a meditation about existence.

For Patino, cinema is a game in which the director invites several people, the spectators, to play. It is like travelling around different universes in quest of some keys to help us to interrogate ourselves before the screen, which is the mirror that reflects our own existence.

A new work in 1993, the excellent Holoscopio, a video installation for the exhibition Las edades del hombre which was held at Salamanca cathedral, led him to Andalusia, where he created, for the regional television Canal Sur, the series Andalucía, un siglo de fascinación (1994-1996), made up of seven episodes in which he revises several sociocultural and historical aspects of the Andalusian Community from a creative and imaginative point of view.

Some years later, on the occasion of the event Salamanca 2002, European Capital of Culture, he was commissioned a film about the city. He made Octavia, a film in which the beauty of the images conceals the slowly demise of a form of living. Metaphorical and lucid but sadly misunderstood, it was a profound meditation about the socio-political situation of a city which we can consider as a model of the whole of Spain. Octavia was the last film he made within the industry but not the end of his career. His most recent experiments include the short film A la sombra de la Alhambra, the audiovisual presentation Homenaje a Madrid and several promotional works. And lately Espejos en la niebla (2008), an innovative experimental work in which he is once again searching for the reflections in which reality looks at itself.

Patino is still investigating with images. He did it in the past and he is still doing it today. Devoted to a phantasmagorical game where truth and fiction combine to create the truth of the representation of images. He is, without doubt, a magician of creation and blending. And above all he is still a young and lucid innovator.

ADOLFO BELLIDO LÓPEZ

QUERIDÍSIMOS VERDUGOS

(ESPAÑA) -1973- 35 mm. / Color / 100 minutos.

• DIRECTOR: Basilio Martín Patino.
• GUIÓN: Basilio Martín Patino.
• FOTOGRAFÍA: Acácio de Almeida, Alfredo F. Mayo, Augusto García Balbuena.
• MONTAJE: Eduardo Biurrun.
• MÚSICA: J. S. Bach.
• INTÉRPRETES: Antonio López Sierra, Vicente Copete, Bernardo Sánchez Bascuñana.
• VERSIÓN: Original.
• PRODUCTORA: Turner Films, S.A.

Through the testimony of the three executioners –executors of sentences– who worked in Spain in the first years of the sixties, the film explores a particularly gloomy period of the dictatorship. Over and above the plea against the death penalty, the film examines the personal history of the three protagonists and their different ways of understanding the job they carry out, of the people executed by them in garrotte and their virtues, of the crimes for which they are punished…

MADRID

(ESPAÑA) -1987- 35 mm. / Color / 114 minutos.

• DIRECTOR: Basilio Martín Patino.
• GUIÓN: Basilio Martín Patino.
• FOTOGRAFÍA: Augusto G. Fernández Balbuena.
• MONTAJE: Juan Ignacio San Mateo.
• MÚSICA: Carmelo Bernaola.
• INTÉRPRETES: Rüdiger Vogler, Verónica Forqué, Maria Luisa Ponte, Luis Ciges, Ana Duato.
• VERSIÓN: Original.
• PRODUCTORA: La Linterna Mágica, S.L.

Hans, a German filmmaker, is in Madrid to make a TV programme about the city and the Spanish civil war, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the latter. Accompanied by his editor Lucía and his cameraman Goyo he scours the city shooting images of the present, willing to discover the places and the people related with the past. At the same time, he reviews and edits the archive footage of the time. In his quest, Hans doubts and questions himself about the meaning and the nature of his job.

EL GRITO DEL SUR: CASAS VIEJAS

(ESPAÑA) -1996- Betacam SP / Color / 61 minutos.

• DIRECTOR: Basilio Martín Patino.
• GUIÓN: Basilio Martín Patino.
• FOTOGRAFÍA: Luis Cano.
• MONTAJE: Fernando Pardo.
• MÚSICA: Dimitri Shostakovich.
• INTÉRPRETES: Reginald Shave, Ricardo Muñoz Suay, ciudadanos de Cazalla de la Sierra y El Pedroso.
• VERSIÓN: Original.
• PRODUCTORA: La Linterna Mágica para TVE.

The repression by the law enforcement officers serving the Republic of a libertarian revolt of peasants in the little village of Casas Viejas in the province of Cádiz, in 1933, is ‘reconstructed’ through testimonies, historical analysis and fragments of films supposedly recovered.

OJOS VERDES

(ESPAÑA) -1996- Betacam SP / Color / 92 minutos.

• DIRECTOR: Basilio Martín Patino.
• GUIÓN: Basilio Martín Patino.
• FOTOGRAFÍA: Antonio Pueche.
• MONTAJE: Elbia Álvarez.
• INTÉRPRETES: Amós Rodríguez Rey, Raquel Rodrigo, Carlos Álvarez Novoa, María Galiana, Gloria de Jesús, Antonio Blázquez, Imperio Argentina.
• VERSIÓN: Original.
• PRODUCTORA: La Linterna Mágica para TVE.

The history of the “copla”, a musical genre that has been the object of contrasting cultural assessments, is reviewed through the figure of Rafael de Maura, the marquis of Almodóvar, who was hopelessly in love with a singer and collected during his lifetime a series of documents and fetishes with which he dreamt of creating a museum. But there are two people who compete for his legacy.

A LA SOMBRA DE LA ALHAMBRA

(ESPAÑA) -2006- DVD Pal / Color / 17 minutos.

• DIRECTOR: Basilio Martín Patino.
• GUIÓN: Basilio Martín Patino.
• MONTAJE: Pedro Alvera.
• INTÉRPRETES: Inés Sánchez Bascuñana.
• VERSIÓN: Original.
• PRODUCTORA: La Linterna Mágica, Centro de Arte José Guerrero.

The accounts of Inés, the daughter of Bernardo Sánchez, executioner in Granada who died in 1972 and who was one of the protagonists of the film Queridísimos Verdugos, telling us, thirty four years later, how she got to know his father through the film and the impact this revelation had in her life, turn out to be an incredible testimony of the power of cinema as a therapy and of the presence of the symbolic father through this. Inés faces her family background and, through speech, she overcomes the dark and troubled memories of that Spain ruled by Franco which marked her childhood.

ESPEJOS EN LA NIEBLA

(ESPAÑA) -2008- DVD Pal / Color / 62 minutos.

• DIRECTOR: Basilio Martín Patino.
• GUIÓN: Basilio Martín Patino.
• FOTOGRAFÍA: Santiago Ochoa, Fernando Pascual, Carlos Mezquita, Antonio Moro.
• MONTAJE: Martin Eller, Pedro Alvera.
• MÚSICA: Johan Solco Bakker, Federico Tensi, Cristóbal Rodríguez Moure, Scott Stallings, Gabriel Calvo.
• LOCUCIÓN: Lourdes Francia, Macu Vicente, Pedro Alvera.
• VERSIÓN: Original.
• PRODUCTORA: La Linterna Mágica, S.L.

The latest audiovisual project of La Linterna Mágica is a critical interpretation of the past which starts from a particular case, from an intrahistorical look, to try to cast light over the social, economical and cultural tensions that afflicted Spain in the first third of the twentieth century.