Viva la muerte
At our invitation, Francesca Bozzano, the Director of Collections at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, has curated a varied selection of short and feature films from their catalog. This program includes ten screenings ranging from silent cinema, experimental films, and animation to underground, documentary, and classic films, with several restorations done by the Cinémathèque de Toulouse or from elements preserved in their vaults.
In the presence of Francesca Bozzano, Director of Collections at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse
The first film by Fernando Arrabal, author of the famous Letter to General Franco, and a writer and playwright who moved to France in the late 1950s. A childhood crushed by Franco's regime. The story of Fando, a young boy confronted with the disappearance of his father, considered a traitor at the end of the Spanish Civil War. A largely autobiographical premise for a surrealist storm of dreams, fantasies, rituals and allegories. Pure "Panic" cinema, for what remains one of the most flamboyant and provocative self-exorcisms of the cinema of exile.
Fernando Arrabal
Fernando Arrabal is a Franco-Spanish poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and filmmaker. He has directed seven feature films and published a substantial body of work, including over a hundred plays, fourteen novels, eight hundred poetry books, and several essays. He is famously known for his Letter to General Franco, written during the dictator's lifetime. His complete plays have been published, in multiple languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over 2000 pages. Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Roland Topor, Christian Zeimert, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. For Arrabal, Panic is a "way of being governed by confusion, humor, terror, chance, and euphoria," themes recurrent in his art. Influenced by Lewis Carroll's magical world, as well as Kafka, Beckett, Artaud, and Alfred Jarry, he has broken conventions, particularly in theater. Arrabal spent three years as a member of André Breton's surrealist group and was a friend of Andy Warhol and Tristan Tzara. The New York Times' theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the "three avatars of modernism".
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