When an old friend brings filmmaker Enrique Goded a semi-autobiographical script chronicling their adolescence, Enrique is forced to relive his youth spent at a Catholic boarding school. Weaving through past and present, the script follows a transvestite performer who reconnects with a grade school sweetheart. Spurred on by this chance encounter, the character reflects on her childhood sexual victimization and the trauma of closeting her sexual orientation.
Gael García Bernal
Ángel / Juan / Zahara
Fele Martínez
Enrique Goded
Daniel Giménez Cacho
Padre Manolo
Lluís Homar
Sr. Berenguer
Francisco Maestre
Padre José
Francisco Boira
Ignacio
Juan Fernández
Martín
Nacho Pérez
Young Ignacio
Raúl García Forneiro
Young Enrique
When an old friend brings filmmaker Enrique Goded a semi-autobiographical script chronicling their adolescence, Enrique is forced to relive his youth spent at a Catholic boarding school. Weaving through past and present, the script follows a transvestite performer who reconnects with a grade school sweetheart. Spurred on by this chance encounter, the character reflects on her childhood sexual victimization and the trauma of closeting her sexual orientation.
This film treads the fine line between providing an entertaining and sexy piece of cinema with the identification of the serious issues of sexual abuse committed if not always by the clergy, then certainly under their auspices, in Franco's Spain. The story centres around aspiring actor "Angel" (Gael Garciá Bernal) who turns up, unannounced, at the door of his former schoolfriend. This man "Enrique" (Fele Martinez) has gone on to become a successful film director and, perhaps optimistically, "Angel" hopes that the unfinished manuscript he has brought might turn out to be his ticket to success. It transpires that these men have not seen each other since school (some 16 years earlier) and that this document is semi-autobiographical - it takes both back to their childhood where, under the supervision of "Fr. Manolo" (Daniel Giménez Cacho) they attended a catholic school where they had sexual encounters with each other and with others with varying degrees willingness. The story is dark, certainly, but here is plenty of humour and shagging as the story unfolds. We are deliberately left to judge the extent to which "Angel" is being truthful, fanciful or just plain enthusiastic, and we are also offered a fairly unique take on how vengeance might be applied. The narrative is complex, the timelines and characters shift making it quite a thought provoking film to both watch and begin to understand. Well worth it, though!
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.
Alex, an intersexed 15-year-old, is living as a girl, but she and her family begin to wonder whether she's emotionally a boy when another teenager's sexual advances bring the issue to a head. As Alex faces a final decision regarding her gender, she meets both hostility and compassion.
Fifteen-year-old Lulu has never known any affection from her family. But when she goes to a rock concert with Pablo, a friend of the family, he introduces Lulu to her first sexual experience. Years later, Pablo and Lulu have married; Pablo has created a sheltered, private world for Lulu, into which nothing intrudes. However, Lulu tires of her cloistered existence, and begins hanging out in shady bars, looking for vicarious thrills and danger.
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971. Carlos Robledo Puch is a 19-year-old boy with an angelic face, but a vocational thief as well, who acts ruthlessly, without remorse. When he meets Ramón, they follow together a dark path of crime and death.
It is summertime in a blue-collar, marginal district of a city in the South of Spain. Tano, a teenager currently serving a sentence in a juvenile reform center, is given a 48-hour leave to attend his brother’s wedding.
A chronicle of the life of Jaro, the leader of a juvenile delinquent gang, depicting his rise from street urchin to outlaw anti-hero on the way to his inevitable end.
Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.
A portrait of the director’s young adulthood, set in the 1940s–1950s, in the electric capital city of Santiago. There, he decides to become a poet and is introduced, by destiny, into the foremost bohemian and artistic circle of the time.
A young man from a small mining town embroils himself with a wealthy family with a dubious past.
A commentary on Spanish society dressed as a thriller about the misadventures of a gang of young petty criminals after the real estate crash.