The current issue of Caimán cuadernos de cine includes a feature on 50 films to look out for in 2019 (not available online, hence the image of the page I want to emphasise); the vast majority are the (predictable) titles that will show up in such features irrespective of the geographic location of the magazine, but they’ve also highlighted some homegrown titles in the mix. Caimán was where I first heard/read mention of ‘el otro cine español’ so it’s perhaps not surprising that their emphasis is on filmmakers who fall into that loose archipelago of a ‘group’, but it is nonetheless welcome because I wouldn’t ordinarily hear about such films until they make a splash at a film festival.

By strange coincidence, six of the filmmakers featured appeared in one of my round-up pieces of my favourite films of the year (on the earlier incarnation of the blog that focussed solely on Spanish cinema) back in 2014 – although some of them have made at least one other film in the meantime, it’s somewhat depressing that it has taken 4-5 years for the others to manage to make another feature. Of those six earlier films, I saw four at film festivals and two on DVD (three of the festival titles have still not been released in a home viewing format), an indication that I may have to be willing to travel if I want to see these new ones. Putting Almodóvar’s Dolor y gloria to one side (because it should get a UK release), the films that I’m most interested in tracking down are:

• Tempo vertical / Vertical Time (dir. Lois Patiño). That 2014 round-up piece sums up how I found Patiño’s Costa da morte / Coast of Death (2013) (also reviewed by me here) to be a visually overwhelming experience in the cinema, and I am intrigued by the description of the new film as ‘una película fantasma’ where ‘time appears to be still while nature continues living’ [my translation of the text in the image] because that sounds like a kind of companion piece to his eerie short film Noite sin distancia / Night without Distance (2015) (reviewed by me here).
• El año de descubrimiento / The Year of Discovery (dir. Luis López Carrasco). López Carrasco’s previous film, El Futuro / The Future (2013), specifically took place in 1982 (the film opens with the audio of Felipe González’s victory speech in the aftermath of the PSOE’s triumph in the 1982 election) [I wrote about the film – and also Costa da morte – in this festival report focussed on Spanish films that screened at Bradford International Film Festival] and the new one is apparently 1992. Yes, that’s ten years later but 1992 was a significant year for Spain (my PhD thesis covered 1992-2007 and the choice of starting year was not happenstance) so I’ll be interested to see how López Carrasco treats the potent cultural currents of that year (for example, is the title a reference to the anniversary of Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic [the mention of shipyards in the description is what has made that connection in my mind]? Or something completely unrelated, in the lives of characters in the film? [side note: the Columbus connection is relatively minor in terms of what was going on in Spain in 1992, but it was what the title suggested to me])
• Longa Noite / Long Night (dir. Eloy Enciso). Enciso’s Arraianos (2012) [my review is here] shares Costa da morte‘s rootedness in the Galician landscape – although Enciso’s film also maps itself into the musicality of the Galician language as well – and this new film likewise seems to have a strong connection to that borderland region.
• Reservado al personal / Staff Only (dir. Neus Ballús). I’ve only written about Ballús’s La plaga / The Plague Year (2013) in the context of that round-up piece. But I’m interested to see how her filmmaking style has developed given that the description suggests that this is also a docu-fiction, and that – although it focuses on a father-daughter conflict during a family holiday to Senegal – it also seems to retain her interest in people living/working in in-between spaces, this time encompassing the darker side of the tourism industry.
• La virgen de agosto / The August Virgin (dir. Jonás Trueba). I haven’t written much about Trueba’s films to date – the round-up piece is the only place I’ve written about Los ilusos / The Wishful Thinkers (2013), and his earlier Todos las canciones hablan de mí / All the Songs Are About Me (2010) featured in my equivalent post from 2011. ‘Dreamy / romantic chronicles of Madrid’ could broadly summarise those of his films I’ve seen so far (I’ve not yet caught up with Los exiliados románticos / The Exiled Romantics, which looks like ‘dreamy / romantic chronicles outside of Madrid’), and the description suggests that this one also falls within that realm. Given that his last film (La reconquista / The Reconquest (2016)) has ended up on Netflix UK, there might be an outside possibility that this will do likewise but I’ll not bet on it if the opportunity to see it at a festival appears (I’ll continue tapping my foot while waiting for Los ilusos to get a DVD release).

I guess that there’s a possibility that one or some of these films might feature within Edinburgh’s focus on Spanish cinema (given that it’s the contemporary strand that hasn’t been announced yet). Fingers crossed!

*The English titles given above are my literal translation of the titles, so they may end up being called something else in English if they circulate. The exception is Neus Ballús’s film, which had that translated title when it screened in Berlin.