Lejos de los árboles
Film Information:
Year:
1970
Far from the Trees
País:
Director:
Color:
B&W
Format:
Digibeta
Duration:
103 min
Cast:
- Manuel Cano, Marta Mejías
Production:
- GUIÓN: Jacinto Esteva
- FOTOGRAFÍA: Juan Amorós Andreu
- MONTAJE: Juan Luis Oliver
- PRODUCCIÓN: Gustavo Quintana
Contact:
- Filmoteca de Catalunya
- Carrer del Portal de Santa Madrona, 6-8
- 08001 Barcelona, Spain
- T +34 93 316 2780
- F +34 93 316 2783
- E filmoteca.cultura@gencat.cat
Synopsis
Just watching El encargo del cazador –the heartbreaking documentary his friend Jordá dedicated to him– is enough to acknowledge Jacinto Esteva as one of those extreme characters that suddenly sneak through the cracks of the usually old and gray-haired official Spanish cinema. And just watching Far from the trees is enough to confirm that his art wasn’t exactly comforting, especially when compared to what their colleagues of the Madrid New Spanish Cinema were doing, or even the ones at the School of Barcelona, which he supposedly was part of. Because Far from the trees is literally an atrocity, a dirty stab, an unmerciful and glacial description of the blackest, deepest Spain through the way of its rituals and ancestral ceremonies. Among that barbaric element, Esteva doesn’t go around like an anthropologist; instead he portrays it with a mixture of rejection and fascination, which shapes the film’s peculiar tone. And there’s no moral tale in his ambiguous and disconcerting images, because, in a way, those of us who live in this country know that we’ll never free ourselves from that nightmare.
CL