With a Golden Bear for Spanish director Carla Simon and four compatriots nominated for Oscars, including superstars Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, Spanish cinema has now begun to captivate a global audience.
When Bardem and Cruz, who have been married for more than a decade, were both tapped for Oscars, the 53-year-old actor could hardly contain his excitement.
“The fact that [Cruz’s] nomination was for a role in Spanish ... seems really extraordinary, even historic in terms of the Spanish brand,” he said last month.
Photo: AFP
Unlike other nations with a long and distinguished history of cinema, Spain has struggled to establish itself on the international stage.
So far, Luis Bunuel has been the only Spanish director to win the coveted Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his provocative 1961 movie Viridiana, but all that is changing, with Spanish cinema increasingly recognized for its contribution to the silver screen, the most recent being Carla Simon’s triumph at this year’s Berlinale where she took the top prize for Alcarras, a Catalan drama about peach farmers.
Variety magazine has reported that Cruz is rumored to be in the running for president of the jury at Cannes, an honor already bestowed upon the legendary Pedro Almodovar, by far Spain’s best-known filmmaker.
Cruz herself is the only Spanish actress ever to win an Oscar, taking home the gong in 2009 for best supporting actress in the Woody Allen comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
If she wins best actress at the Oscars later this month for Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, it would be a coup for a film entirely “Made in Spain,” whose soundtrack has also been nominated for best original score.
The score was written by Basque composer Alberto Iglesias, who has worked with Almodovar for two decades on 13 of his movies. It is the fourth time an Iglesias soundtrack has been nominated for an Oscar.
For him, there is “strong momentum” within Spanish cinema.
“There is an energy ... it has to do with the film schools that have been working for a long time to create new filmmakers,” Iglesias said.
“It has been really difficult for Spanish cinema to cross the threshold and get into these big international festivals,” said Pilar Martinez-Vasseur, director of the Spanish Film Festival in the French city of Nantes.
Spanish movies which have received acclaim abroad are often not identified as such, she said, pointing to the 2001 psychological thriller The Others starring Nicole Kidman which was directed by Spain’s Alejandro Amenabar.
“In Spain, we still have the idea that Spanish cinema is bad, that it’s a nest of communists, that filmmakers are pampered, they do nothing and get subsidies,” she said, calling for greater support from the Spanish government.
Filmmaking in Spain receives far less state aid than in France, experts say.
Spanish cinema has had to “learn how to break into a globalized ecosystem,” said Beatriz Navas, who heads the Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts, which is subsidized by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport.
“This hasn’t happened overnight because you need some sort of ‘greenhouse’ environment where filmmakers can work with freedom, and the ‘incubation time’ needs to be sufficient for these productions to achieve the recognition and prestige they deserve,” Navas said.
As well as Cruz, Bardem and Iglesias, Spain also has a fourth horse in the Oscar race in the shape of Alberto Mielgo’s The Windshield Wiper, which has been nominated for best animated short film.
“This is the best moment for Spanish cinema,” said Jose Luis Rebordinos, director of the prestigious San Sebastian film festival.
“We are making a lot of cinema and audiovisual productions in Spain, as well as for streaming platforms, which is bringing a lot of work, so Spanish film technicians are getting better and better,” he said.
Spain’s Western-friendly landscapes have drawn Hollywood directors since the 1960s and it is becoming an increasingly popular destination for filming series — Netflix, which set up its first European studios in Madrid in 2019, scored huge hits with Money Heist and Elite.
Last year, the government said it wanted Spain to become Europe’s “audiovisual hub,” pledging to inject 1.6 billion euros (US$1.8 billion) to expand the film and TV production sector by 30 percent by 2025.
“International critics are increasingly focusing on our cinematic output thanks to figures like Almodovar, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz,” Rebordinos said. “They are finding ways to draw more attention to Spanish cinema.”
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