Antoni Padrós

Birth : 1937-01-01, Terrassa, Spain

History

Born in Terrassa, in Cataluña, in 1937. A key figure in Catalán avant-garde cinema, contemporary with but not a part of the Barcelona School. He self-funded his early films from his job at a bank, leading to the production of two feature-length films and 11 shorts. 

Movies

L'home precís
Director
A narrative in the form of a Christmas story filled with repetitions, the specific routines of a precise man, in which the visit of death is part of the specular game.
Fragmentos para una historia del otro cine español
Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated events that FRAGMENTS compiles through various firsthand accounts, film excerpts and documents. For the first time in Spain, a documentary brings together the most relevant of a cinema that is slowly losing its invisibility.
The Rise, Fall, and Repose of Maria von Herzig
Director
Spanish actress María de Montenegro marries a Nazi officer, von Herzig, in Berlin during World War II, and years later is forced to return to Barcelona. There she hopes to find what could be her last chance to regain her lost success.
Ombres de foc
Director
Short film by Antoni Padrós
Shirley Temple Story
Director
A humorously distorted version of the life of Shirley Temple, and described by its director as a terrorist musical. Shirley Temple sets off for the Emerald City to tell the Wizard that she is upset that Judy Garland has been selected for the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. On this trip she is accompanied by a group of characters who make reference to a fragmented, bipolar society. The film was begun as Franco was ill and completed after his death, and makes reference to the oppression of Spain during this period.
Lock-Out
Director
An allegory of political oppression under Franco, with a plot alternating between narrative sequences and dream-like moments styled after the Spanish avant garde. Padrós employs a range of musical forms including opera, scores, and choreography to underscore a plot featuring a group of dropouts living in a junkyard who try to re-integrate with "The System" as represented by a party.
Els Porcs
Director
Short film based on a real news item in which a student from Ohio was sentenced to spend three hours in a pigsty to learn to differentiate between a pig and a policeman. It shows a group of friends which make up a surreal symphony of people counting pigs and the actress Rosa Morata, dressed like a decadent cabaret performer, who unsuccessfully tries to escape from a runaway herd of men.
¿Qué hay para cenar querida?
Director
Short film that addresses family repression through the bond between a brother and a sister in which the stronger takes advantage of the weaker.
Swedenborg
Director
A tragedy that does not avoid irony while showing a couple in a romantically disastrous state.
Pim, pam, pum, revolución
Director
Short film dedicated to the "established order" (yet made clearly outside of it) and drawing from the protests of 1968 and the struggle for socialist revolution, it also challenges the Catholicism and nationalism of Franco's Spain. It depicts the breakdown of a relationship, as the woman leaves for Germany where the Marxist struggle needs her help, and the man mocks her revolutionary ideals.
Ice Cream
Director
A short film about a mysterious ceremony, based on an essay by William S. Burroughs.
Daphnis and Chloe
Editor
Daphnis and Chloe wander through a forest, intercut with shots of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and following no clear chronological trajectory, in a questioning of sexual roles and the permissible standards of Franco-era cinema.
Daphnis and Chloe
Screenplay
Daphnis and Chloe wander through a forest, intercut with shots of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and following no clear chronological trajectory, in a questioning of sexual roles and the permissible standards of Franco-era cinema.
Daphnis and Chloe
Story
Daphnis and Chloe wander through a forest, intercut with shots of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and following no clear chronological trajectory, in a questioning of sexual roles and the permissible standards of Franco-era cinema.
Daphnis and Chloe
Director
Daphnis and Chloe wander through a forest, intercut with shots of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and following no clear chronological trajectory, in a questioning of sexual roles and the permissible standards of Franco-era cinema.
Alice Has Discovered the Napalm Bomb
Director
(Very) loosely based on Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, with a soundtrack partly from Cream and Tuli Kupferberg, and shot in the cemetery of Terrassa, this film presents a protest of American imperialism and the Vietnam War.
Free
Director
Short film by Antoni Padrós