ABOUT CARLA SIMON - Rod Bishop discovers the work of the Spanish director

Carla Simon

Catalan writer-director Carla Simón was six-years-old when she was orphaned. Both her parents died from needle-transmitted AIDS. 

Simón was forced to leave Barcelona for a small town in northern Catalonia, where she was raised by her uncle and his family. She later studied film in Barcelona and the London Film School. 

Now 39, she has helmed three feature films and eight shorts. 

 

SUMMER 1993 (2017), streaming on Apple TV

Simón’s first feature was an instant success and chosen to represent Spain at the 2018 Academy Awards. 

An autobiographical backstory to her latest feature Romería (2025), Summer 1993 opens with the orphaned six-year-old Frida (played by an astonishing Laia Artigas), being forced to leave Barcelona to live with her uncle Esteve, his wife Marga and their daughter Anna on a self-sufficient Catalonian farm.  

Frida is completely disorientated by the experience. Disorientated by farm life after Barcelona; disorientated by her new family; and particularly disorientated by a developing relationship with the four-year-old Anna. At various times, she puts the younger girl in danger and her new guardians fear they have been lumbered with a dysfunctional child. They wonder if they should get rid of her. 

In her village, rumours surround Frida and she becomes further disoriented when ostracized after bleeding in a playground accident. AIDS is never mentioned, but the blood phobia, the mention of ‘a virus’ and the constant trips to the doctor for blood tests make it clear both her parents have died of AIDS.

Frida’s hard-fought journey to accept her pariah status and come to terms with her new world drives a simple narrative distinguished by its heightened emotional power. Laia Artigas plays Frida brilliantly, with a poker face and wide-eyed observance of all around her, as she constantly figures out her new life. 

For a first feature, Summer 1993 heralds a fully formed filmmaker in confident control over nuance and ellipsis, and blessed with a quite remarkable child actor.

It won the Best First Feature Award at the Berlin Film Festival and three Spanish Goya Awards, including Best New Director and Best Screenplay. It won Best Director in the International Competition at Buenos Aires; and at the Gaudi Awards it garnered Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Editing. The Feroz Awards gave it Best Drama, Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay. In all, 30 awards from around the world.

 

 

ALCARRÀS (2022), streaming on Apple TV and Prime

Pedro Almodóvar has called Simón’s second feature a masterpiece: “Behind Alcarràs’s apparent simplicity lies a meticulous director, with hundreds of hours’ worth of work to make this masterpiece look like a documentary.”

It won the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival and was Spain’s entry to the Academy Awards. Followed by Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay at Catalonia’s Gaudi Awards. Alcarrás screened in 60 international film festivals and sold to 35 territories.

The extended Solé family in Catalonia have farmed the same land for generations; land given to them in a verbal promise by a neighbouring family they hid during the Spanish Civil War. The new owner of the land disregards the old verbal agreement and wants them to destroy their fruit trees and install solar panels instead. Faced with rabbit plagues, flooding and price gouging from supermarkets, the family are marooned in a legal quagmire; their way of life doomed. 

The cast are entirely non-professional and Simón carefully fuses the rhythms of everyday farming life with the rhythms of the natural world. Hovering above her beautifully rendered portrait of this humanist family, is the encroachment of a ruthless commercial world wanting to repurpose the land and force protesting farmers into capitulation.

Once again, familial disorientation is Simón’s principal focus and this time a whole extended family are disoriented. Beautifully directed, Alcarrás once again also shows Simón’s extraordinary talent with actors of all ages.  

 

ROMERĺA (2025), current Spanish and Latin American Film Festival

In Competition at Cannes in 2025, Simón’s latest feature upgrades the orphaned six-year-old Frida of Summer 1993 to the now 18-year-old orphan Marina (Llúcia Garcia), who is wanting to apply for a scholarship to study film at a Barcelona university. 

But her name doesn’t appear on her father’s death certificate and she must obtain validation of her birth from a grandparent. Clutching her mother’s diary, she journeys to Vigo in Galicia to meet with her parental family for the first time. She wants her grandfather to sign the appropriate change to his son’s death certificate.

Everything is awkward about her visit, firstly with an uncle and his family; and then with a dressmaker aunt; with young cousins who have been warned not to touch Marina because of her blood; and with contradictory stories and dates about her parents. Finally at an extended family gathering in the sumptuous home of her grandparents, she finds she is anything but welcomed, or wanted.

Marina spends her whole pilgrimage (romeria) in wide-eyed, dazed disorientation, waiting for snippets of information about her parents. She does learn of their heroin addiction, their drug dealing, and her AIDS-positive mother taking Marina to Barcelona as a baby. She is devastated to learn the grandparents kept her AIDS-afflicted father a virtual hostage in their house until his death.

Simón then shifts gears from the naturalism of all her features, and creates a magical realist third act where Marina spectates on the lives of her parents.

Among its other qualities, Romería is a chance to wonder at who our parents really were before we were born. All Simón’s great strengths are in evidence here, her naturalistic acting performances; her ability to make us feel like wide-eyed spectators experiencing the chaotic humanity of extended family life; and the almost subliminal way she makes us feel the ache and pain of a lost family.

Carla Simón’s next project is a flamenco musical.

 

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2022 - Barrie Pattison reports on MAIXABEL (Iciar Bollaín) and HOUSE OF SNAILS (Macarena Astorga)

Bianca Portillo, Maixabel

After years of providing highlight viewing, the current Spanish Film Festival has proved a mixed bag. As an example, David Martín Porras’La piel en llamas/Skin in Flames is pretentious and clumsy, a total contrast to Director Iciar Bollaín’s Maixabel. 

Maixabel offers maturity rare in a movie, one that picks emotional conviction over ideology. Though it centers on Spain’s ETA movement, which took eight hundred plus lives, there is minimal discussion of the cause, a separate Basque Communist state – just a passing reference to police murders. That’s going to get up a number of noses to start with. This would be a different movie to someone who is more familiar with the Spanish scene than I am.

 

The action movie opening, which gets disproportionate attention in the publicity, is set in Tolosa, Guipúzcoa (Basque Country, Northern Spain) and shows a 2000 ETA death squad murder the moderate former Civil Governor, while he eats in a restaurant - escaping as they pass a misinformed cop car on the road while listening to police radio and then burning their white Renault while the search had begun for a black Citroen. 

 

The victim dies before wife Maixabel (Blanca Portillo, in a bad red wig), was able to get to the hospital. The news reaches their teenage daughter María Cerezuela at her summer camp with young friends.

 

This is just the hook. The film proper picks up with jailed killers Luis Tosar and Urko Olazabal a decade into their thirty year sentences, now barely able to tolerate one another’s company though it is all they have, rejected by the old associates they detest, as well as the wider community. Once close friends don’t want to be seen with Tosar in the street while their children are with them. “Nada es normal.”

 

Transferred to Nanclares jail, where they can have day release to visit aging relatives, they work in the prison bakery (“bread is made at night”). Tosar’s attendance at the funeral of his grandfather - effectively evoked though he is only glimpsed in the flashback trial - begins his reconnection to the outside world.

 

This is already an arresting departure from the films we know, with the Prison Governor without hostility and scenes of the two leads scornful of the jail yard “mediocrities” who had sent them unquestioning on the mission that now corrodes their lives. 

 

Luis Tosar, Bianca Portillo, Maixabel

In the meantime, now broadcaster Portillo has headed up a committee to address the consequences of terrorist outrages, alienating support by extending their remit to cover victims of both sides of the conflict. Portillo is delighted when her daughter becomes pregnant, because she will now have an event more central in her life than the father’s murder. 

 

However, the girl lives in terror of losing her in the way she lost her father and begs Portillo to hire bodyguards. Portillo attends a meeting where the delegates assert that protection is the only reason they remain alive. 

 

The image of her going about her day with two burly men in suits a few steps behind her is one of the most haunting in a film that has more than its share - the defaced hillside granite monolith, the word “traitor” blood red on the wall outside Tosar’s mother’s flat, the bread machine churning dough as the prison motif, rather than barbed wired walls. 

 

The pivotal event comes in the offer of reconciliation meetings with the relatives of victims after the hooded ETA leaders renounce armed struggle on TV. It’s made clear that it will not have any effect on the convicted men’s sentences. The controversial gesture is withdrawn with the change of government but the governor points out that he can’t determine what they do in day release and a social worker arranges Tosar’s no-security visit with Portillo.

 

The key scenes in the film are Portillo’s two face-to-face sessions. The first, with Olazabal, introduced with a glimpse of him hammering the court glass partition and screaming “Fascist” at the judge, reveals him now crushed by what he now sees as his own stupidity and viciousness This is so powerful that it seems a film-making misjudgment - something they can’t effectively follow. However, Bolain and her team know where they are going and the second, facing Tosar, is even more resonant - his coming to terms with the possibility of forgiveness.

 

Maixabel is an analysis that is more probing than what we are used to seeing in movies (or journalism), though Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s 2009 Ulster-set Five Minutes of Heaven was a respectable try. The real Maixabel Lasa was involved in all stages of production which must have shaded the result. The finale with Tosar joining the leftist song (unsubtitled) which he knew in his youth is again pushing their luck but the film’s momentum is there to carry it.

 

The performances are exceptional. Heavyweight Tosar is now in the first rank of his country’s stars but Portillo has been around for a long time without registering as clearly. She does have a Goya award along with a significant career in theatre - which won’t mean anything to us. Javier Agirre Erauso’s camerawork offers the current low light level images.

 

Former actress Bollaín situated herself at the thoughtful end of the spectrum after appearing in the Ken Loach Land and Freedom and directing a couple of films by his writer Paul Laverty. On the evidence of her work to reach us, anchoring the content in a dramatic form has sometimes proved a challenge for her - 2003 Te doy mis ojos/Take My Eyes, the exceptional 2010 También la lluvia/Even the Rain (both with Tosar) and 2020 Rosa’s Wedding/La boda de Rosa. This time she’s really nailed it. The film is imposing.

 

It will be interesting to see if Palace pushes this one out into a commercial release and whether it will connect with the public it deserves. Best to home in on the festival showings just in case.

 

Along with the material I’ve already covered in Sprocketed Sources, I also looked at Macarena Astorga’s La casa del caracol/House of Snails,an irritating quasi horror film. 

Javier Rey, House of Snails

 

In the sixties author Javier Rey rents the remote and remarkably well-maintained villa on the road outside Andalusian Quintanar village, where his reception is pretty hostile - a little girl squashes a snail on his car window, a one eyed woman hints he doesn’t belong (“You don’t look like the type that has friends round here”) and the house keeper is sullen. Her daughters accuse him of being a Vimaro monster (he finds the obligatory book of mythology identifying it hidden in the house library) and the mean bar keeper who prompts him on local drinking etiquette leads a chorus of derision from the customers, when Rey uses up his stock of Mescal, and sells him local home brew instead. The man keeps a sadistic bald headed relative chained in the barn after it ate the heart of a cow - “his favourite cow.”

 

Following a call with his publisher which prompts Rey to rip the phone out of the wall, he starts incorporating all of this into his new book.

 

The news is not all bad however, realtor Paz Vega is a likely prospect but she won’t let him autograph his own book - confessing that it’s the library copy. Local priest Carlos Alcántara invites him to come fishing and loads a shotgun for his use, and the dog which he confronted on the road hangs about. The one eyed woman warns that any dog that people had thrown out couldn’t be any good. When he gets lost in the woods, Rey hears the sound of the wolves that don’t normally come down from the hills.

 

Vega invites him to the village festival with band and bonfire but won’t let him grope her. We find out why. As things develop none too coherently, the death of the girl in the wolf mask brings in shaggy outside police sergeant Pedro Casablanca, with the dismemberment photos, before the burial in a graveyard overrun with more snails. He registers as mundane and sensible in all this - and the dog fetches a folder with a news cutting that connects to Rey’s own past. The snarling wolf head on the wall, the ink rising off the girl’s drawing in a glass of water, do show imagination. They belong in a better, more connected film. The film’s erratic handling suggests that the director is still in the early stages of her career. 

 

Spain is after all the country that accommodated Paul Nashy despite Franco’s disapproval. We could have hoped that a new Spanish shocker would be better than this.

 

Still a week to go.

Spanish Film Festival 2021 - Supercinephile Barrie Pattison takes on the task of examining the offering - HEROIC LOSERS (Sebastián Borensztein, Argentina), WHILE AT WAR (Alejandro Amenßbar, Spain), WISHLIST (Álvaro Díaz Lorenzo, Spain)

Well we’ve gotten through this year’s Spanish Film Festival and I could recycle the comments I made on previous events - films better than the ones we get in other distributions on the evidence of cherry picking the program because time and cost made it too demanding to do it full justice.

Not surprisingly the most endearing item was Argentinian, La odisea de los giles/Heroic Losers, another piece from star Ricardo Darin and director Sebastián Borensztein, a superior caper comedy drama in the impressive line of the team’s 2016 Kóblic/Captain Koblic and their 2011 Un cuento chino/Chinese Take-Out.

 

In the new film, everyone is doing it tough in run down Argentinian town Alsina, where the train doesn’t stop anymore. One time local soccer hero Ricardo has a plan to revive the closed down grain storage facility, save handling costs on the crops and create jobs. He persuades his none too bright neighbours to put their savings into the scheme. “We couldn’t be doing any worse.” 

 

However, the crooked bank manager and sharp lawyer Andrés Parra manipulate the restrictions of  the Argentinian financial crisis Corralito to make off with the savings of Darin and his neighbours, moved from their safety deposit box into an account which is impounded.

 

So far so so but a vividly filmed car crash changes the direction of the piece. The victims learn about Parra’s state of the art vault concealed in a cattle pasture.

 

Characters whose interests run to fishing with dynamite, painting the deserted rail station and buying twin cell phones with no one to call, have to be marshalled into a sophisticated plot to get the money from the vault - out dated explosive, a remote control toy car and Darin’s son planted as a spy in Parra’s office, chatting up the secretary, along with a few hints from Wyler’s 1966 How to Steal a Million.

 

Their blundering attempts make them a kind of Hispanic Lavender Hill Mob and the film builds skillfully to the break-in, cross cut with the vengeful lawyer abandoning a society celebration to go racing to the scene, pistol in hand.

 

Considerable art conceals art with the fatal accident and the country’s descent into poverty giving weight to the superficially knockabout plot. The filming uses off-centre faces not always brightly lit and low contrast lab work to deliver the accomplished handling without traditional big picture gloss.

 

The audience I saw it with broke out in spontaneous applause. How’s that for an endorsement. This is a superior entertainment that should function in any release pattern. 

 

I don’t know that I would say that about Mientras dure la guerra/While at War,  which we are told is the first Spanish film from celebrity director Alejandro Amenßbar (Mar adentro 2004, Tesis 1996) in seventeen years. This one is packed with historical references that are likely to baffle someone who isn’t up on 1930’s Spain - Falangists, Royalists, Masons, Puritans, Legionaires, the Burgos Junta, the Marrocan colonies. 

 

A car load of German Nazis is given minimal respect. Someone tells us that the BBC has just reported that Federico Lorca has been shot. Who is the character with the hand gun running through the Salamanca town square shrubbery as the Nationalist troops set up there? 

 

Even from an imperfect understanding it’s still an impressive piece, realised on a large scale with convincing period detail.

 

Distinguished scholar Miguel de Unamuno, Chancellor of the University of Salamanca,  played by Karra Elejalde, is reproached by his politicised daughter for making a half year salary donation to the soldier's fund but he still  keeps the company of a Protestant Cleric and a young leftist, taking coffee with them when the streets are full of trucks of soldiers firing into the air. Nothing is clearcut, with the menacing young black shirt turning out to be an autograph hunter fan.

 

However, in parallel with this, attention focuses on Santi Prego as Francesco Franco, still a military officer afraid of a falso passo, an error of judgement which will make him miss the opportunity the divisions in the country represent. He refuses to make a bid for power when he doesn’t believe he has popular support but, in the film’s most rousing scene, he has the monarchists’ flag rolled out on the front of the barracks causing the troops to spontaneously break out in the Spanish National Anthem. 

 

Like the Juan Biadas version of  Franco in Balada triste de trompeta/Ballad for a Sad Trumpet/The Last Circus, the character is not rendered as a stock villain.  That part is given to blustering, war wounded Legion Commander Eduard Fernßndez who uses his wall eye to frighten children or drives past the column of his exhausted troops proclaiming “Viva la muerte”. 

 

Meanwhile Prego draws inspiration from the depiction of El Cid in the fortress-Cathedral paintings and shrewdly moves to relieve the Siege of the Alcazar though it’s value is symbolic rather than tactical. 

 

Dismissed by the new authorities, Elejalde is reinstated because Franco’s wife is an admirer of his work but he finds himself unable to save friends and sees his statements taken out of context to support the fascist cause.

 

Events come to a head in the University speech day when Elejalde is unable to stay mute and rises to deplore a divided Spain where the Basques and Catalans are vilified. Fernandez demands to speak but can only sputter when he takes the floor and falls back on blurting out “Espagna” which carries the day in a wave of fascist salutes and anthem singing. 

 

This is a simplification of the production’s dense and complex argument – something which is possibly too elaborate for film form to carry. Elejalde’s Unamuno, the intellectual wavering between conflicting ideologies as history is made around him, is an intriguing match with Karel Hoger’s  Obcan Brych/Citizen Brych in the 1959 Otaka Vavra Czech film, though I suspect the comparison would horrify the makers of both. 

 

There is no disputing that Mientras dure la guerra  is a work of high seriousness nor the excellence of its craft skills. It deserves to be treated as such. How it will fare so far from its intended audience is a matter of speculation. 

 

At the other extreme we get La lista de los deseos/Wishlist,  a Three Coins in the Fountain  for the Me Too generation - female buddies, fatal illness, scenery. 

 

In Sevilla, Maria Leon is a vet with cats named De Niro and Pacino. Her equally glamorous friend Silvia Alonso moves in after her unworthy, shaven headed live-in lover of five years presents her with a case of contraceptive pills. A breast examination by Leon’s chum (wide eyed male spectator) reveals a lump which proves to be cancer. One of those alarming head shaving sequences follows. At the clinic they meet veteran patient, the indestructible Victoria Abril and, rather than mope about waiting for test results, the three women pile into a white camper van and head for Morocco with raunchy to do lists.

 

I’m not the target audience for this one. It’s all a bit treacly for my taste though it has its moments - the opening where Abril whips off her wig to reveal that chemo has left her bald or the sub-plot of the patrol cop’s daughter. Of course, even the orchestra is beautiful.

 

The event was full of substantial films. I’ve already used Sprocketed Sources (click on the link to get there) to enthuse about Iciar Bollain’s  La boda de Rosa/Rosa’s Wedding and the savage  Intemperie/Out in the Open with Luis Tozar in top form. Throw in presentable El asesino de los capricios/The Goya Murders and No Mataras/Cross the Line 

 

... but what did they take on for an extended run subsequent to the festival at the Palace chain? Pablo Larrain's ridiculous Ema. Funny old world!