Currently On Sale On Sale: 2011 Archive On Sale: 2010 Archive On Sale: 2009 Archive On Sale: 2008 Archive On Sale: 2007 Archive On Sale: 2006 Archive SE: Magic Flute Viva Pedro! Returns SE: Inland Empire Next Gen.: Affleck YFF: Bad Company Spanish Cinema Now Program Overview DarkBlueAlmostBlack Crossing the Border Celia’s Lives Alatriste Welcome Home The Tower of... Life Hanging... The Night of... Lady Nitwit Quixotic Tirant Lo Blanc... The Education of Fairies SHORTMETRAJE Carnival Sunday Round Two The Crime... 7 Virgins Salvador Out of Here Lola The Magicians Flamenco The Last Horse FCS: Charles Grodin SE: Alan Arkin Dance on Camera Jewish Film Festival Film Comment Selects Mariinsky Theater SFP: Broken Blossoms The New World Hearing Images ND/NF Classics SE: Elaine May IN: kabul transit SE: For Your Consideration Janus Films Two from Lebanon U.S. vs Lennon Prairie Home SFP: Head over Heels Anne Fontaine Lulu Forever Leo Awards Kaufman Brothers Film & Citizenship Sensations in Sound Next Gen.: Scorsese Austrian Cinema YFF: Nosferatu IN: Home Hungarian Cinema Avant-Garde LatinBeat OC: Miami Vice A Killer Life Emergence Sholay YFF: Factotum Russian Fantastik The Lift Project SFP: A Cottage on... IN: Manhattan Kansas RockDocs Judy Holliday SE: A Scanner Darkly Heroic Grace II Shaw Bros Classics Scanners: NY Video Fest Flying Daggers OC: Touch the Sound FCS: The Descent OC: Superman Returns Benoît Jacquot Human Rights Watch The Unburied Man OC: United 93 YFF: Big Night IN: Holy Modal Syrian Cinema Balanchine Klimov & Shepitko FCS: Pine Flat Irving Berlin New Italian Cinema Kieslowski Series YFF: Salaam Bombay! African Film Festival SFP: The Eagle Film in Catalunya YFF: Lonesome Jim YFF: Big Chill YFF: Bob the Gambler French Docs Rendez-Vous Contempt Film Comment Selects On Sale: 2005 Archive Archive 2005 - To April Archive 2004 - WRT Archive 2003 - WRT Archive 2002 - WRT Archive 2001 - WRT Archive 2000 - WRT Archive 1999 - WRT Archive 1998 - WRT Archive 1997 - WRT Archive 1996 - WRT

Spanish Cinema Now! December 8 - 26, 2006 Presented in collaboration with the Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Instituto Cervantes of New York and the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade (ICEX). 2006 should go down as a banner year for Spanish cinema; the great international success of Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth set the pace, together providing powerful evidence that daring, imaginative works can still attract broad audiences. This year’s selection for Spanish Cinema Now shows in its breadth of styles and subjects how Spanish filmmakers refuse to rest on the tried and true, continuing instead to work out news forms of expression. Agustín Díaz Yanes’s Alatriste, based on the series by Pérez-Reverte, offers a different kind of swordsman-hero, more brooding and pensive in actor Viggo Mortensen’s interpretation. Celia’s Lives, directed by leading producer Antonio Chavarrías, is an effective updating of film noir, while Esteve Riambau and Elisabet Cabeza’s The Magicians interprets a bizarre fantasy-adventure film made during the Spanish Civil War as a true and revealing document of the period. The series also features several extremely impressive debuts, including Daniel Sánchez Arevalo’s wonderful DarkBlueAlmostBlack and Javier Rebollo’s Lola — powerful evidence that the future indeed should be bright for Spanish Cinema Now! As part of this year’s Spanish Cinema Now! we’re proud to present City Streets and Secret Passages: The Films of Edgar Neville. As film historians have begun to delve more deeply into the cinema of the early years of Franco’s regime, a certain amount of reevaluation has taken place. Perhaps no artist has received a more welcome rehabilitation than writer/producer/director Edgar Neville. Born in Madrid in 1899, Neville early on showed great literary promise. Producing plays and vaudeville sketches before he was 20, Neville joined in the booming Madrid cultural scene, befriending Ortega y Gasset, García Lorca and Manuel de Falla. In 1929 he was sent to Washington as cultural attaché at the Spanish Embassy; while visiting California, he fell under the allure of Hollywood and soon was adapting films for Spanish-language versions. His friend Charlie Chaplin would later call him the best storyteller he ever met. Returning to Spain, Neville continued working in film, directing his first feature, The Infamous Carabel, in 1935. When the Civil War broke out, despite his friendship with many Republicans (including Buñuel), Neville joined Franco’s film unit; in Rome he shot The Madrid Front, which included a scene of reconciliation between Nationalist and Republican soldiers that was censored before its Spanish release. In both his plays (he always remained active in theater) and films, Neville seemingly felt most comfortable in late-19th-century Madrid, a city of very separate, often ramshackle neighborhoods full of secrets hidden behind high walls and locked doors. His most emblematic film is The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks, in which a secret community of counterfeiters living beneath the city streets is accidentally revealed. Neville’s characters are travelers whose journeys are suddenly interupted by some extraordinary discovery. His actors — he especially favored Conchita Montes and a very young Fernando Fernán Gómez — are always masterful at maintaining their cool even in the most remarkable circumstances. Neville depended heavily on sets and costumes to create atmosphere, yet the touching The Last Horse clearly parallels the work of the then-contemporary Italian neorealists. Here’s a chance to discover a truly hidden gem of Spanish cinema, a director of great taste and intelligence who, in the most unlikely of circumstances, was nevertheless able to create a personal, distinctive cinema. Discover through this brief sample the cinema of Edgar Neville, Spain’s first true auteur. For a listing of the films in the series go to Program Overview. Click on Calendar to view the schedule, film descriptions and to purchase tickets online. Back to Top

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