José Luis Alcaine

José Luis Alcaine

Birth : 1938-12-26, Tangier, Morocco

History

José Luis Alcaine is a Spanish cinematographer. Educated in Tangier, he was the first cinematographer to use fluorescent tube as key lighting in the 1970s.

Profile

José Luis Alcaine

Movies

Parallel Mothers
Director of Photography
Two unmarried women who have become pregnant by accident and are about to give birth meet in a hospital room: Janis, middle-aged, unrepentant and happy; Ana, a teenager, remorseful and frightened.
So My Grandma's a Lesbian!
Director of Photography
Eva, a young and promising Spanish lawyer based in Edinburgh, sees her wedding plans with the heir to an important and ultra-conservative Scottish family in jeopardy when she learns that her grandmother, Sofía, has decided to marry…
The Human Voice
Director of Photography
A woman watches time passing next to the suitcases of her ex-lover (who is supposed to come pick them up but never arrives) and a restless dog who doesn't understand that his master has abandoned him.
Domino
Director of Photography
Seeking justice for his partner’s murder by an ISIS member, a Copenhagen police officer finds himself caught in a cat and mouse game with a duplicitous CIA agent who is using the killer as a pawn to trap other ISIS members.
Pain and Glory
Director of Photography
Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.
Everybody Knows
Director of Photography
Laura, a Spanish woman living in Buenos Aires, returns to her hometown outside Madrid with her Argentinian husband and children. However, the trip is upset by unexpected events that bring secrets into the open.
The Queen of Spain
Director of Photography
After her experiences in Nazi Germany, actress Macarena Granada traveled to Hollywood, where she became a star. In the 1950s, the diva returns to Francoist Spain to star a Hollywood blockbuster about Queen Isabella I of Castile. (A sequel to The Girl of Your Dreams, 1998.)
Wild Oats
Director of Photography
Everything changes for Eva when she receives an insurance settlement check accidentally made out for $5,000,000 instead of the expected $50,000. She and her best friend take the money and head out for the adventure of a lifetime.
Aragón rodado
Self
A look at the Aragonese countryside, star of the movie screen, accompanied by various trades of cinema.
I'm So Excited!
Director of Photography
Something has gone wrong with the landing gear of a plane en route from Madrid to Mexico City. The group of eccentric travelers on the flight, defenseless in the face of danger, indulge in colourful confessionals, while the outlandish crew attempts to find ways to entertain them.
La banda Picasso
Director of Photography
Paris, 1911. When Da Vinci's painting “La Gioconda” is stolen from the Louvre museum, it is suspected that the authors of the audacious theft are members of a group of bohemian artists led by painter Pablo Ruiz Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire…
Passion
Director of Photography
The rivalry between the manipulative boss of an advertising agency and her talented protégée escalates from stealing credit to public humiliation to murder.
The Skin I Live In
Director of Photography
A brilliant plastic surgeon creates a synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage. His guinea pig: a mysterious and volatile woman who holds the key to his obsession.
My Life in Ruins
Director of Photography
A Greek tour guide named Georgia attempts to recapture her kefi (Greek for mojo) by guiding a ragtag group of tourists around Greece and showing them the beauty of her native land. Along the way, she manages to open their eyes to the wonders of an exotic foreign land while beginning to see the world through a new set of eyes in the process.
Lolita's Club
Director of Photography
The plot follows the story of twin brothers, one is a coldhearted violent police officer, the other is a helpless romantic with a mental disability. The two brothers are tragically involved with a prostitute who works in the bordello that gives the film its title. The film was adapted from an eponymous novel written by Juan Marsé.
Theresa: The Body of Christ
Director of Photography
In the 16th century, the daughter of a Spanish nobleman joins a convent and becomes a spiritual leader.
Blame
Director of Photography
When nurse Gloria has financial difficulties, her friend Dr. Ana Torres invites her to move with her six year-old daughter Vicky to her old big house where she runs a gynecologic clinic. In return, Gloria will assist Ana in her clinic in the afternoons.
The Maidens' Conspiracy
Director of Photography
Constantinople, 1401. The emperor of Byzantium asks the famous knight Tirant lo Blanc to free the city from the siege of the Turks. After his victory, Tirant will have to face a more difficult task: to overcome the natural opposition of Carmesina, heiress to the Ottoman Empire, to surrender her most precious treasure.
Volver
Director of Photography
Raimunda lives and works in Madrid with her husband Paco and their daughter Paula. Raimunda's sister Sole lives nearby. The two sisters miss their mother Irene who died several years ago in a house fire along with their father. When a former neighbor from their hometown reports that she has seen the ghost of Irene, the daughters do not believe her. After a murder and a family tragedy, however, Irene's spirit materializes around her daughters to comfort them.
Vida y color
Director of Photography
Roma
Director of Photography
Joaquín Góñez, a novelist in his sixties recalls his emotions, his wild years in Buenos Aires, the memories of old friends, the meaning of loyalty and the intimate relationship with his mother, Roma.
The Whore and the Whale
Director of Photography
A Spanish writer finds an old coffer with photographs of an Argentine man who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War, and of a woman. Her quest for answers brings Vera to the Argentine Patagonia.
Bad Education
Director of Photography
Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, the movies and fear in a religious school at the beginning of the 1960s. Father Manolo, director of the school and its professor of literature, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three are followed through the next few decades, their reunion marking life and death.
South from Granada
Director of Photography
Brenan arrives at Yegen on foot, interrupting the funeral held for the daughter of the local cacique. He collapses from dysentery and soon learns that the local cacique, Don Fernando, is leaving for Granada with his wife. Brenan rents Fernando’s house for a year and soon enlists the services of María as housekeeper and cook and becomes friends with a local man named Paco. Brenan spends most of his time reading, walking, and trying to write poetry.His friends Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey (who is ill), and Ralph Partridge visit for a couple of days. Brenan, who has been maintaining a correspondence with Carrington, learns during the visit that Partridge and Carrington are engaged. He is crushed, as he had been in love with Carrington.
The Dancer Upstairs
Director of Photography
A police detective in a South American country is dedicated to hunting down a revolutionary guerilla leader.
Antonio, a boy in Lisbon
Director of Photography
A boy in Lisbon, in this Lisbon in permanent renovation.
Blast from the Past
Director of Photography
Following a bomb scare in the 1960s that locked the Webers into their bomb shelter for 35 years, Adam now ventures forth into Los Angeles to obtain food and supplies for his family, and a non-mutant wife for himself.
Gunslinger's Revenge
Director of Photography
The idealistic lifestyle of an old West farmer, his Indian wife, and half-breed son is interrupted when the boy's old gunslinger father returns. They are not happy with his return despite the old gunslinger's intention to retire. Things take a turn for the worse when another gunslinger arrives in town, trying to force a battle with the father.
Don Juan
Director of Photography
Spain in the mid-seventeenth century. A series of bloody wars has ravaged the nation. Don Juan the nobleman and his valet, Sganarelle, roam the countryside on horseback, on the run and lost.
Más allá del jardín
Director of Photography
Palmira, a woman belonging to the Sevillian aristocracy, as well known for her decrepitude and hypocrisy as the rest of her population, enters into an emotional crisis when she reaches maturity.
Freedomfighters
Director of Photography
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the nun Maria is forced to flee her convent. She takes refuge in a brothel, until it is liberated by a woman's anarchist group. Maria joins the group and eventually goes to the front. The women's group faces the problems of fighting not only the nationalists, but also factions on the left seeking to impose a more traditional military structure.
Confidencias
Director of Photography
Two Much
Director of Photography
Art Dodge is a painter-turned-gallerist drowning in debt. He gets in over his head when a con job leads to an engagement with a rich divorcee. He gets in deeper when he falls for her sister, and invents a twin brother to be her beau; and deeper still when his fiancée's ex-husband comes looking for revenge.
Turkish Passion
Director of Photography
A young woman’s passion forms the basis of this erotic Spanish drama adapted from a popular novel by Antonio Gala. The night before Desideria’s marriage, her girl friends give her some valuable advice on sex. The marriage takes place, and while it is generally happy, her husband Ramiro suffers from sexual dysfunction and Desideria is frustrated. The two end up on holiday in Istanbul with two friends. Desideria falls madly in love with the sensual ambiance of the ancient, teeming city. She begins a passionate affair with a handsome Turkish guide, Yaman. Upon her return home, she learns that she is pregnant. Ramiro agrees to support the child, but unfortunately it dies in infancy and the grieving Desideria flees for Istanbul to find her lover. She finds him and they renew their torrid affair. Later she learns some distressing things about Yaman, but this does not stop her from becoming his sexual slave and a call girl for wealthy carpet sellers.
The Tit and the Moon
Director of Photography
A child does not stand the idea of having a new brother and dreams about drinking milk from the breasts of his mother again. The child asks the moon to bring him a tit only for him.
Golden Balls
Director of Photography
Benito González is a flamboyant engineer in Melilla, with a brash and pushy personality. His dream is to build the tallest building ever in the region. After his girlfriend leaves him, he devotes himself entirely to his ambitions, deciding to let nothing get in his way. He marries the daughter of a billionaire, intending to use her father's money to realise his project. Benito waltzes his way through a career of excess, fetishes and deceptions, but the personal conflicts he unleashes ultimately send his life spiraling down to disaster.
Intruso
Director of Photography
In childhood and youth, the three were "the inseparables." Luisa married Ángel, then two years later, she left him to marry Ramiro. After ten years, Ángel reappears, back from South America, broke and ill. Luisa is overcome with sentimentality and, over Ramiro's objections, takes Ángel into their house. Ángel is bitter, he and Ramiro have shifted from best friends to enemies. Luisa wants to be in love with both. Ramiro hopes he can wait out Ángel's declining health, and Luisa wants to heal Ángel through force of will. What is Ángel's plan? Observing the roiling emotions are Luisa and Ramiro's precocious young children. Who's in danger here?
Belle Époque
Director of Photography
In 1931, a young soldier deserts from the army and falls into a country farm, where he is welcomed by the owner due to his political ideas. Manolo has four daughters, Fernando likes all of them and they like him, so he has to decide which one to love.
Jamon Jamon
Director of Photography
Jose Luis is an executive at his parents underwear factory where his girlfriend Sylvia works on the shop floor. When Sylvia becomes pregnant, Jose Luis promises her that he will marry her, most likely against the wishes of his parents. Jose Luis' mother is determined to break her son's engagement to a girl from a lower-class family, and hires Raul, a potential underwear model and would-be bullfighter to seduce Sylvia.
Lovers: A True Story
Director of Photography
Set in '50s Spain, a young man leaves the army and looks for a job so he and his fiancée can get married. He rents a room from a widow, and shortly begins a torrid affair with her. The fiancée figures it out and decides to win him back by offering herself to him and taking him to meet her family. Ultimately he has to make a decision. Based on a true story.
Ay, Carmela!
Director of Photography
Paulino and Carmela are husband and wife, troubadours touring the countryside during the Spanish Civil War. They are Republicans, and with their mute assistant, Gustavete, they journey into rebel territory by mistake. They are arrested, fear a firing squad, and receive a reprieve from an Italian Fascist commander who loves the theatre. He arranges a performance for his troops, bargaining with Paulino to stage a burlesque of the republic in exchange for the actors' freedom. Will the fiery and patriotic Carmela consent?
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Director of Photography
Recently released from a mental hospital, Ricky ties up Marina, a film star he once had sex with and keeps her hostage.
El Lute II: Tomorrow I'll Be Free
Director of Photography
This is the story of a man fighting with all his might for his life and his freedom. Eleuterio (”El Lute”) embarks upon an action-packed future, fuelled by the notions of freedom and dreams of living just as his countrymen, ever-growing in his mind. Nothing and no-one can stop him. After escaping the Puerto de Santa María prison, the reunion with his family is just the beginning of what will become an endless escape.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Director of Photography
Pepa resolves to kill herself with a batch of sleeping-pill-laced gazpacho after her lover leaves her. Fortunately, she is interrupted by a deliciously chaotic series of events.
Lute: Forge On or Die
Director of Photography
In Spain of the 1960s, a poor family of quinquis - a nomadic ethnic group with a tradition as old as that of the gypsises of Spain but with even more obscure origins - have a nomadic life marked by poverty. The son, Eleuterio Sánchez Rodriguez, nicknamed "El Lute", steals some chickens and is condemned to six months in jail. El Lute moves to the slum outskirts of Madrid with his common law wife, Chelo, starting an itinerant life as a peddler of pots and pans and living in a quinqui shantytown. He gradually embarks upon as life of petty criminality, eventually participating in the theft of a jewelry store during which a bystander is killed.
Half of Heaven
Director of Photography
After the civil war, Rosa, a beautiful and hard worker woman falls in love with a sharpener who turns out to be a con man. When she becomes a widow, she emigrates to Madrid with her daughter beginning to work as a nurse in the home of Don Pedro, an influential food manager.
Hay que deshacer la casa
Director of Photography
Ana is a middle aged woman who many years ago decided to start a new life in Paris. Now she must return to her hometown after the death of her parents, since they have left her an inheritance. There she meets Laura, her only sister, with whom she has to share the money received and, especially, an old house located in the center of Guadalajara. Now, the two women will have to leave the differences and problems behind that have arisen in the past to catch up and recover the fraternal relationship. Written by lament
Mambru Went to War
Director of Photography
The news of the death of Franco has a special resonance in the family of Florentina. Fiorentina communicates to the rest of the family a story far more important than the general's death: her husband Emiliano (Fernando Fernan-Gomez), who had been left for dead in the civil war, is alive. During the Franco dictatorship has remained hidden beneath the pylon is in the courtyard of the house.
Star Knight
Director of Photography
A medieval alchemist (Klaus Kinski), knight (Harvey Keitel) and priest (Fernando Rey) mistake a flying-saucer alien for a dragon.
Rustlers' Rhapsody
Director of Photography
A singing cowboy roams the Wild West with his sidekick, dancing horse and fancy wardrobe.
La reina del mate
Director of Photography
The Lost Paradise
Director of Photography
This literary film is imbued with the disenchantment of Spanish exiles who left their homes to protest Franco's fascist regime and then returned after its demise to find that democracy had not instilled either ethics or deep motivation in government leaders. Director Basilio Martin Patino presents his story, and a large part of the film is based on his own life, through the experiences of an exiled heroine played by Charo Lopez. She has returned to Spain to look for meaning in her life, something that she never found living in Germany, not even after having a child. She is also in the process of translating the German lyric poet Friederich Holderlin (see the 1985 Halfte Des Lebens) into Spanish, focusing on his epic Hyperion. Excerpts from the translation are voiced over throughout the film. As she looks up old friends from many, many years ago, even those who have achieved worldly success are suffering from the same ennui that propelled her back home.
Akelarre
Director of Photography
A small village in Navarre, Spain, XVII century. Garazi's grandmother is burned at the stake when accussed of being a witch and convicted by an inquisitor, something that brings Garazi under suspicion and eventually into prison, where she is atrociously tortured and humiliated.
El sur
Director of Photography
In the North of Spain, Estrella grows up captivated by her father, a doctor with mystical powers—and by the enigma of his youth in El Sur, a near-mythical region whose secrets haunt Estrella more and more as time goes on.
Murder in the Central Committee
Director of Photography
The plot follows a private detective, an ex communist and former CIA agent, who travels from Barcelona to Madrid to discover the identity of the assassin of the leader of the Spanish Communist party who was stabbed during a blackout while presiding over a meeting of the party's central committee. The film is a thriller with ironic political overtones.
Bésame, tonta
Director of Photography
A young bank clerk is transferred, in view of his special way of being, to a branch for misfits, where he will meet a whole series of very strange characters.
Después de… Segunda parte: atado y bien atado
Director of Photography
A history of the Spanish Transition told in first person by the main protagonists: on the one hand, the politicians, idealistic or merely opportunistic, who brought it to a successful conclusion in the tribunes and offices; on the other hand, the citizens who, in the streets, supported it sincerely or fought it with ferocity.
Per favore, occupati di Amelia
Director of Photography
Después de… Primera parte: no se os puede dejar solos
Director of Photography
A small group of filmmakers, led by the Bartolomé brothers, took to the streets at the beginning of the Transition to gather the opinions of politicians and citizens about the country that was about to be formed. Today, this documentary work is a true milestone that defines the history of cinema in Spain, since all its testimonies allow us to understand the plurality of a young society that meditated on how to think about its past and build its future.
La campanada
Director of Photography
Girl with the Golden Panties
Director of Photography
Luys Forest is a writer with a political past Falangist, who lives isolated in a coastal town, writing his memoirs (actually rewriting and adapting his autobiography with the times), and brooding over his failed marriage. His sister is worried about him and decides to send his daughter Mariana on how it is. Mariana comes to town and shake the world of Luys stable with free and uninhibited personality. Soon begins a game of seduction that ends up exposing the intellectual game of Luys.
The Triple Death of the Third Character
Director of Photography
Gulliver
Director of Photography
From Hell to Victory
Director of Photography
In 1939, at a Paris café, six friends of various nationalities vow to meet again at the same spot after the end of WW2.
Marián
Director of Photography
Soldados
Director of Photography
Dramatic portrait of men and women discouraged in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, after the odyssey of a group of Republican soldiers trying to reach the east coast to go into exile. Agustín must bear that his libertine father lives with the ironer Remedios, although she does not love him. She escapes and he goes to war; when they finally meet again, anxious amid bursts, it will be impossible to consummate their desires repressed for so long.
Let's Go, Barbara
Director of Photography
Ana is Catalan, daughter of a bourgeois family and works in a studio in advertising. She is 38 years old and has only lived with her husband, with whom she has a relationship cold but accepted by both. Although his family is opposed, decides to leave her husband and takes a vacation with her daughter Barbara, of 12 years, in order to leave behind all the past and start a freer life, with fewer ties, less conventional.
Stay As You Are
Director of Photography
A May-December romance. Roué Giulio Marengo, a Roman landscape architect unhappy in his marriage, meets Francesca, a young and beautiful Florentine, and then learns she might be his daughter. He resolves to keep his hands off but can't seem to stay away, and she's eager for a lover who's a father figure.
Red Gold
Director of Photography
A boatswain finds himself stranded on an island. Though surrounded by starving, and poor islanders, the boatswain soon learns that the misery is not caused by the people themselves, but rather by a pack of blood-thirsty pirates.
God Bless Each Corner of This House
Director of Photography
Goodbye Alicia
Director of Photography
Alice is a girl devoid of affection seeking refuge in the images shown in the movie screen of a theater that his father manages. This creates improbable stories in which she is the protagonist...
María, la santa
Director of Photography
Diego , the son of a prostitute stabs Maria , suddenly it begins to happen a number of miracles attributed to the intercession of the dead woman . Patients from all over town arrive to implore and consider her as a saint.
School Trip
Director of Photography
After completing his high school studies at the age of twenty-four, Óscar is an immature student, unable to afford alone his return to home during the summer season. Then he manages to convince Carlos, his young math teacher, to accompany him. Already in the family home, Óscar begins to behave in an increasingly unbalanced and irrational way. Meanwhile, his family will endeavor to see him as the reflection of the absent father figure.
Family Portrait
Director of Photography
Cecilio Rubes, a businessman engaged in the manufacture of baths and toilets, tries to remain neutral in the imminent Spanish civil war. But the attitude of Cécil, his only child, a spoiled boy who grows without respect their parents, will forced him to face the cruel reality of the facts. Jumping back and forth in time, we are shown his present and his past through his wife Adela and Paulina, the mistress of father and son.
Who Can Kill a Child?
Director of Photography
A couple of English tourists arrive at the island of Almanzora, off the Spanish Mediterranean coast, where they discover that there are no adults in a small fishing village, only some children who stare at them and smile mysteriously.
Songs for After a War
Director of Photography
A particular reading of the forties and fifties in Spain, the hard years of famine and repression after the massacre of the Spanish Civil War, using popular culture: songs sung by ordinary people, newspapers and magazines, movies and newsreels; the story of a country torn apart needing to overcome the memory of the war and face an uncertain and painful present.
País S. A.
Director of Photography
A useless kidnapper tries to kdnap a rich industrialist.
A Diary of a Murderess
Director of Photography
A beautiful young woman sets her sights on an aging millionaire. She seduces him, and moves into his mansion with him. She soon tires of him, though, and after she gets rid of him, she goes after his son.
Pepita Jiménez
Director of Photography
Devil's Exorcist
Director of Photography
Teresita, the only daughter to a wealthy couple, begins to be troubled by loud sounds and visions of a tall man in black walking towards her menacingly. Soon she becomes plagued by strange physical symptoms, visions of arms extending from the walls to grab at her...and sometimes she gets violent. A priest is called in to try and wrench the devil from her body.
Sensualidad
Director of Photography
I Saw Her First
Director of Photography
Corazón solitario
Director of Photography
Antoñito is a bachelor who works in a cabaret as a clarinetist. He has put an advertisement in the newspaper, looking for a good and honest girl, and to which responds Rocío, who escapes from her native Córdoba to hide the embarrassment of her pregnancy. The coexistence with the naive clarinetist, who refuses the insinuations of a co-worker dedicated to prostitution, who idolizes his deceased mother and keeps as a relic the orthopedic leg of his late father, is not easy. The other men will tend their ties around Rocío, that makes way in the world of the spectacle pretending to be blind. When she can no longer conceal that she is pregnant, Antoñito decides to give his name to the fruit of sin.
El niño es nuestro
Director of Photography
El cronicón
Director of Photography
Tinto con amor
Director of Photography
Paseo por los letreros de Madrid
Director of Photography
A travelogue through the diverse neighborhoods of Madrid, its picturesque streets and its history; and an approach, with a sense of humor, to the lighted signs and advertising slogans of the shops: an unusual portrait of the city and its people.
Acteón
Still Photographer
An expressionist reimagining of the classic Greek myth involving Acteón and Diana, transposed to Spain's Costa Brava by a future auteur of horror cinema. Based on the myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which Acteón accidentally catches a glimpse of Diana, the goddess of love, and is subsequently turned into a deer for his dogs to devour, Jorge Grau's modernist retelling resets the story to contemporary Spain, where a fisherman – played by Martin LaSalle, star of Bresson's Pickpocket – follows an enchanting, flirtatious stranger into the city.
Javier y los invasores del espacio
Director of Photography
Nine Letters to Berta
Still Photographer
Lorenzo is a young man who has just returned to Salamanca (Spain) from England, where he fell in love with Berta, a girl daughter of exiled parents who have never seen Spain. Lorenzo tries through some beautiful letters that she understands how is the world where her parents once lived.
Carmen de Carabanchel
Director of Photography
Adam's Perfection
Director of Photography
Adam had everything: the looks of a movie star, the mind of a genius, a seven-figure salary, a brilliant career - everything but a woman worthy of his love. Having lost hope, he resorts to a dangerous experiment and, with the use of an oriental spiritual practice, creates the perfect partner. He alone will be able to enjoy her company, for she is unseen by others. In search for perfection Adam left many a woman behind. Should he not get along with the new girlfriend - leaving may not be an option.