Jesús Gluck

Madrid, Spain, 1975; shortly after the end of the Franco dictatorship. Six months after the mysterious death of his lover, a prestigious tailor, a married woman visits the office of the young Germán Areta, a former police officer turned private detective, to request his professional services.

"El Florido Pensil" is a humorous reflection of the education of several generations of Spaniards from the 1940s to the 1960s. Based on the book of the same name by Andrés Sopeña, it evokes, from the present, his memories of that time: everyday school, local radio, Roberto Alcázar's comics, Thursday cinema with Franco opening swamps and "Yon Güein" chasing and killing Indians. Through the childish eyes of a child Sopeña (Daniel Rubio) and his schoolmates, we discover a way of understanding the world, society and a Spain "of glories and flowery pensil", as the national anthem of those years used to sing.

A 50-year-old playwright (Jesus Puente) bemoans his fate from his secluded home in Northern Spain in this depressing drama. Side plots include an actress and former acquaintance who comes to visit and his amorous diversions with a 20-year-old local woman.

4,000 tons of oil have been stolen from a Galician deposit. The alleged thieves are defended by the lawyer Ramos, but the witnesses die and suspicions point to Franco's brother.

Director José Luis Garci has turned his camera inward on filmmakers and screenwriters to portray them as so self-absorbed in the creative process that there is no other world, no other human relationship that can compete. As José (Adolfo Marsillach) and Federico (Jesus Puente) work together on a new screenplay, their interactions with their family (José's teen daughters, Federico's wife) disappear under the all-consuming task of creation. The daughters give up and go off on their own, and the wife joins a convent while Federico barely notices. And when the producer is interrupted by profound grief at the sudden death of his older son, he almost automatically returns to thinking about the film project when the funeral has ended. Garci honors many great directors at the beginning of this film, and the film continues to play out as an elaboration on this homage -- an illustration both of the dedication and the cost of filmmaking, no judgments given.

Private detective Germán Areta el Piojo investigates the life of a gay man who has apparently abandoned his partner. When they both turn up dead, it seems one killed the other before committing suicide, but Areta is not convinced.

A Spanish "Dallas" parody.

A Nobel prize winner returns to his natal city looking for his home.

Private detective Germán Areta el Piojo gets a terminally ill client who wishes to see his long lost, runaway daughter before he dies.

Jose, a journalist and radio broadcaster, runs a daily program under the title 'Alone in the wee hours' ('Solos en la madrugada'), which has garnered a huge national audience as a satirical chronicle of Spanish society in the democratic transition of the late 1970s. Married and separated from Elena, Jose has two children, whom he only sees from time to time. Then he meets Maite, younger than him, outgoing and more open-minded than he wants. The emotional shock caused by his relationship with these two women will change his pessimistic view of life.

Joseph and Helen, who had been boyfriends, there meeting some years later and fall madly in love again, but now the two are married. His hard and clandestine love story addition is determined by the circumstances of the times in which they have lived: the last years of the Franco regime and the beginning of the transition.