28/06/2007

The fourth day of the Pesaro Film Festival comes to an end with an urgent appeal: the conservation of film heritage, and not only in Spain. The appeal comes from Catalan film Las películas de mi padre by Augusto Martínez Torres, experimental filmmaker from the 1970s, who presented La mano de madera at Pesaro in 1968.

Torres is back in a section ironically called "Sometimes They Return", while another retrospective is dedicated to the atypical talent of Ivan Zulueta, whose film Arrebato was also produced by Torres. With Zulueta, the Catalan filmmaker shares the destiny of some short films to be found in the archives of film museums, development labs, and even courts. They shout: film legacy is threatened by death, "ignored by both right-wing and left-wing governments" Torres regrets that "the project of creation of a film city in order to preserve the copies and prevent them from their natural degradation is constantly postponed".

In Las películas de mi padre, a young woman (Karme Malaga) finds her vocation in a film museum (the beautiful Cine Doré in Madrid) and, at the same time, gets to know her father, thanks to his films. For Torres, this is a sort of (self-)analysis, which allows him to open himself to the world.

But people are no longer into psychoanalysis – at least judging by the Spanish reception to his erudite and sensual film, in which the director leaves his (erotic) obsessions emerge: Lolitas, female bodies and several lesbian sequences. The film was shown to Pesaro audiences soon after Luigi Comencini's La valigia dei sogni, which shares with Torres' film the same urges and the same lack of success.

Produced by Josè Antonio Pérez Giner for Els Quatre Gats Audiovisuals, Las películas de mi padre was released in Spain on May 11 by Sherlock Films S.L..

(Translated from Italian)