American Cinematheque

This year’s selection of recent Spanish cinema highlights everything from the most exuberant genre pieces to dramas notable for their restrained subtlety. Selections include Agusti Villaronga’s BLACK BREAD, Spain's official 2011 submission for the Foreign-Language Oscar; Daniel Sanchez Arevalo's comedy COUSINHOOD, about a trio of cousins on a pilgrimage back to the pueblo; Montxo Armendariz's DON'T BE AFRAID starring Belen Rueda, which looks with intense yet wrenching care at the long-term effects of child abuse through the lens of one young girl's upbringing; and the nuanced and subversive ANYTHING YOU WANT from director Achero Manas and starring Juan Diego Botto, a gender-questioning drama about a widowed father raising his 4-year old daughter.

Michael Powell called their partnership "a marriage without sex," and Emeric Pressburger said, "Ours is an ideal way of working together, and at the same time, working separately." It was an unlikely pairing of the lean, unmistakably British Powell and the stocky, worldly Hungarian Pressburger that resulted in some of the most intelligently written, beautifully conceived and photographed, and gloriously romantic films in cinema history. Join us for a program that includes THE RED SHOES, BLACK NARCISSUS, GONE TO EARTH, A CANTERBURY TALE and PEEPING TOM.