17/11/2006

Fernando Cámara's Trastorno, Álvaro del Amo's El Ciclo Dreyer, Julio Wallovits' The Chair and Pobre Juventud by Miguel Jiménez are the four local productions hitting Spanish screens today. Four very different offerings from filmmakers with very different backgrounds.

Trastorno is a thriller about two estranged sisters, once very close as young girls, who get pregnant at the same time. After suffering an abortion, one becomes obsessed with the other’s baby and poses a threat to them. Starring Najwa Nimri and Ingrid Rubio – in roles that mark a distinct departure from the usual characters they play – the film, according to Cámara, is an attempt to "get close to the genre 'psychopath at home', which was has been successful in the US but which has never been fully exploited in Spain". Continental Productions is the outfit behind this attempt while DeAPlaneta is handling theatrical distribution.

The screenwriter of last year’s hit film Camarón, del Almo is back with his third feature as a director, El Ciclo Dreyer. Produced by El Paso P.C. and Metrojavier, the film is about a law student who organises a film series on Carl Theodor Dreyer. Some of the love, sexual and religious conflicts portrayed in the films by the Danish director find incredible similarities in the lives of the leading characters, a group of bourgeois students from the 1960s who begin to question the suffocating morality in which they are stuck. El Ciclo Dreyer is being distributed by Premium cine.

Presented at the latest Locarno Film Festival, The Chair [+see also:
trailer
film profile] also opens today, distributed by UIP. The first solo feature by Argentina-born Wallovits – who co-directed the highly praised Smoking Room with Catalan director Roger Gual in 2002 – was produced by Eddie Saeta S.A. and stars Francesc Garrido in a tale of a dissatisfied man who decides to radically change his life and projects all his new faith in an imitation Bauhaus chair he covets that, in the meantime, is sold to someone else.

The fourth local title is Jiménez's directorial debut Pobre Juventud, a tragicomedy about a group of young friends who believe that all their financial problems would be solved if they rob a bank.

Local audiences will choose between these films and the non-European releases of the week, which include Larry Charles' Borat, Neil Burger's The Illusionist, Cory Yuen's DOA: Dead or Alive, Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea and Anne Fletcher's Step Up.