One of my all time favorites.

just watch it!

An Exercise In Nonsense

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This movie is a little bit overrated. In my opinion it received the Goya award NOT for its quality but because of political reasons and string-pulling, like many other things here.The movie is not too bad, sometimes boring, the best thing it has is the gracefulness that comes from the kids, whose acting is just right, maybe overacting, and the scenery and customs are right too. Sometimes you feel you are in a theater instead of watching a movie.The story is absolutely not original, we are tired of always the same, the dictatorship. Spain suffered from a civil war and a dictatorship that clashed different social classes and political convictions. But nowadays some people tries to rewrite it and show it as a war against Cataluña, a region of Spain that has never been a nation or state before, though some try to distort history.We had a bad period but we need to go on.

dark movie. about truth and its price, about illusions and the need of lies. the scene - Civil War shadow who represents perfect arena for a kind of story. like many Spanish films about same period, it is an exercise of exorcism. a child front to reality. the fall of veils. the cruelty of discoveries. it is not easy to say if it is a good or bad movie. because the answer is not on screen. the theme, the acting, the images, the chain of symbols, the final are only a circle. a frame. the real answer, one of them, is work of viewer experiences, memories, impressions. Francesc Colomer has an admirable work and the Balkanic layer of story is almost seductive. but something is more important - the large shadows, the heavy air, the powerful emotions, the force of each detail.a film like a string of answers. in skin of a question out of words. only the ash of images. and traces of a deeper war than one from a history lesson

Black Bread is an elaborate Catalan Spanish ghost story which begins with a hooded man driving a horse drawn carriage through the woods where he attacks Dionis and his son Culet and kills them by leading the horse off a cliff blind folded. A witness, Andreu, an 11 year old boy goes back to town to report the incident. Farriol, who is the partner of Dionis and also Andreu's father is the lead suspect in the murder, due to his previous opposition to Franco during the war. The mayor was in love with Farriol's wife, Florencia, which creates bad blood until Farriol is forced to leave Spain for France. Andreu's grandmother works for the richest family in the area. Now things become really complicated. Andreu becomes friends with a tb patient from a monastery who runs around believing that he has wings. Florencia convinces the wealthy woman to take in her son Andreu as a sort of step child in order to have a better life with education at a private school. More mysteries unfold concerning an old murder and Black Bread proves to be an interesting drama.

This film swept the board at this year's Goyas (Spanish cinema awards), but after last years Cell 211 ( an enjoyable but unremarkable prison drama) did the same, I wasn't expecting too much. I'd enjoyed Villaronga's disturbing Aro Tolbukhin, but I wasn't expecting this. One of the best opening sequences you'll see all year leads to a mystery, experienced through the eyes of one boy, that reveals lies, conspiracy and the dark secrets in the heart of a rural Catalan village a few years after the end of the Civil War. It's magnificently done, and the performances of the children match those of actors such as Sergi Lopez (whose role echoes that in Pan's Labyrinth),Eduard Fernández and Marina Comas.Scenes such as the boy's father instructing him to uphold his ideals and walk tall, or a powerless mother pleading her husband's innocence, are familiar from more commercial films. Here they are brutally undermined until nothing is left but pitiless self interest. A chilling study of how war and poverty create monsters.