Carles Santos

Lucio is an introverted boy who spends his nights dreaming of Greta. Little by little, he begins to prefer to spend his time dreaming, escaping reality and sharing his time with Greta and a mysterious knight.

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.

This latest feature from the eccentrically experimental Catalan director Portabella is a beautiful, sometimes faintly bonkers celebration and contemplation of the role Bach’s music plays in the world today. Blending historical reconstruction with very loosely linked ‘dramatic’ scenes and documentary sequences, the film constitutes a playful, painterly sequence of variations on the argument that Johann Sebastian changed the way the world hears thanks to his extraordinary ear for harmony.

Carles Santos plays several of his pieces on the piano. This film was made for the exhibit on Carles Santos Visca el piano! held at the Miro Foundation in the summer of 2006.

Carles Santos plays several of his pieces on the piano. This film was made for the exhibit on Carles Santos Visca el piano! held at the Miro Foundation in the summer of 2006.

Carles Santos plays several of his pieces on the piano. This film was made for the exhibit on Carles Santos Visca el piano! held at the Miro Foundation in the summer of 2006.

Naked bodies are buffeted by water accompanied by the music Il Temporale from the opera La Cenerentola and the overture to Il Barbiere di Siviglia both by Gioacchino Rossini.

Naked bodies are buffeted by water accompanied by the music Il Temporale from the opera La Cenerentola and the overture to Il Barbiere di Siviglia both by Gioacchino Rossini.

Mario Gas directed this music-themed Spanish drama set in Barcelona of the mid-'80s. When famed composer Lluis Doria (Laurent Terzieff) visits a transvestite club, he learns his lifelong friend Albert Rossell (Serge Reggiani) is the house pianist. A flashback takes the tale four decades into the past where the younger Rossell (Pere Ponce) rejoins Teresa (Paulina Galvez) after having spent years in prison for helping anti-Franco anarchists. The story continues into Paris of the '30s, the period when Doria and Rossell first met, sharing a mutual interest in music and Teresa, before civil war sent them in different directions.

An itinerary through the great creations of Catalan art: Romanesque, Gothic, Modernist and Contemporary; with interviews to Catalan creators such as architect Ricardo Bofill, poet Pere Gimferrer, sculptor Susana Solano, and painter Antoni Tàpies.

A female professor, a writer, and an orchestra conductor--three characters, two couples--attend a grand literary cocktail party. The writer has just won the prize for his book "Warsaw Bridge." The winner answers the journalist's questions one after another, but he is unable to come up with a synthesis of the plot of his book. They will simply have to read it.

A female professor, a writer, and an orchestra conductor--three characters, two couples--attend a grand literary cocktail party. The writer has just won the prize for his book "Warsaw Bridge." The winner answers the journalist's questions one after another, but he is unable to come up with a synthesis of the plot of his book. They will simply have to read it.

Obsessed with finding her old boyfriend, Gumer, a 25-year-old girl, is released from jail in Barcelona, one of Europe's most sought-after port cities for drug trafficking and prostitution. Charo, her best friend, tries to help her, although she is not free, since depends on her pimp "Toni". But Gumer will persuade Charo to abandon Toni and form, along with other friends, a band to start businesses on their own.

Elena, a depressed young Catalan translator, discovers that David, her former lover, is living in New York with a new girlfriend, where she will travel to obsessively look for him and try to win him back.

How does a country go from a dictatorship to a democracy? A detailed report on the political representation in the heart of the Spanish Transition, only a few months after General Franco’s death, when the sincere democratic vocation of Spanish people must effort to destroy, one heavy brick after another, the wall that those who supported the dictatorship and those who fought it from the exile built with resentment, hatred and prejudices.

How does a country go from a dictatorship to a democracy? A detailed report on the political representation in the heart of the Spanish Transition, only a few months after General Franco’s death, when the sincere democratic vocation of Spanish people must effort to destroy, one heavy brick after another, the wall that those who supported the dictatorship and those who fought it from the exile built with resentment, hatred and prejudices.

A young middle class Catalan reflects on the monotony of his life alongside a loose young female with whom he maintains a sexual relation and that will end up telling him the story of her cousin Montse: a social worker who falls for a criminal, therefore causing a great scandal in her family.

The film is divided into two large segments. The first is made up of a couple of fixed shots of the pianist, Carles Santos, playing the Prelude Op.45 in C sharp minor by Frederick Chopin. The second segment shows him listening to this own recording from a loudspeaker until he dons the headphones, therefore letting silence take over the film and consequently also over the audience in the movie theatre. The lenght of the silent shot is for the duration of the prelude.

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.

This film turns on two basic axes: the inquiry into ways of cinematographic representation and a critical image of official Spain at the time of the Franco dictatorship. “Montage of attractions” and Brechtianism in strong doses. Umbracle is made up of fragments (some are archive footage) that resound rather than progress by unusual links, with dejá vu scenes that promise us more but remain tensely unfinished. Jonathan Rosembaun said: “few directors since Resnais have played so ruthlessly with the unconscious narrative expectations to bug us”. Learning from the feeling of strangeness caused by Rossellini as he threw well known actors into savage scenery in southern Europe. Portabella makes Christopher Lee wander around a dream-like Barcelona. Without a doubt Portabella’s most structurally complex and most profoundly political film, that is ferociously poetic.

Short film by Spanish/Catalan film maker Pere Portabella.

Portabella’s first feature, co-scripted by poet Joan Brossa, became one of the most influential works of the Barcelona avant-garde, although like all his early films, it circulated only in an underground fashion. Eschewing dialogue, the director constructs a non-narrative story in fragments that reveal the daily lives of an adulterous couple interspersed with a cryptic stream of unrelated imagery. The title of this homage to directors including Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman, and Buñuel refers to the 29 “black years” of the Franco dictatorship. — chicago.cervantes.es

As publicity for the exhibit Miró L’altre, organized by the Colegio de Arquitectos de Catalunya in 1969, the Board commissioned Pere Portabella to film Miró painting the “poster” for the exhibit on the ground floor windows of the building. Portabella was not interested in simply filming a testimonial documentary. However, he said he would do the film if after the exhibit Joan Miró himself, with the help of the cleaning staff erased his own painting. Joan Miró accepted the idea without a doubt. The complicity between the film maker and the painter is evident in the filming.

1967 short by Carles Santos

1967 short by Carles Santos

1967 short from Spain by Carles Santos

1967 short film from Spain