Tag Archives: Carlos Saura

In a Gypsy village, the fathers of Candela and José promise their children to each other. Years later, the unfaithful José marries Candela but while defending his lover Lucía in a brawl, he is stabbed to death. Carmelo, who secretly loves Candela since he was a boy, is arrested while helping José and unfairly sent to prison. Four years later he is released and declares his love for Candela. However, the woman is cursed by a bewitched love and every night she goes to the place where José died to dance with his ghost.
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A group of flamenco dancers are rehearsing a very spanish version of the Prosper Merimee’s drama. Antonio (the coreographer) falls in love with Carmen (the main dancer). Their story then turns similar to the play.
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In a sense, Carlos Saura’s first foray into filming classical dance, Blood Wedding, may be seen, not as a stark departure from the immediacy of his narrative films, but rather, as an oblique return to form towards the social interrogations implicit in his earlier work on the fundamental question of Spanish identity – a particularly timely and relevant re-assessment in the aftermath of a contemporary history marked by institutional repression, creative censorship, and historical revisionism. It is within this framework that the selected adaptation of the seminal “rural trilogy” play by Spanish playwright, Federico García Lorca – a writer who was executed by Falangists in the early days of the Civil War and whose work was generally banned throughout Franco’s regime – seems particularly suited to this post Franco-era cultural introspection in its dark and tragic tale of passion, betrayal, and revenge.
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After Flamenco (1995) and Tango (1998) – nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 2005 Carlos Saura completes his trilogy on modern urban song with Fados. After over two years of research into the subject, Carlos Saura takes an enormous step forward in his approximation to music. If, in his earlier musicals, Iberia, Flamenco, Tango…, he based his work on dancing, in Fados he makes a special effort with the plot and image to reflect the birth of a suburban, dockland music which is in itself a synthesis of all of the music born towards the end of the 19th century.
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