Cría Cuervos (Carlos Saura)
Hommage à Carlos Saura (1932-2023)
Cría Cuervos
Espagne 1976 | Carlos Saura | vostEN | 109’ | digital | Cast : Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Héctor Alterio
► Grand Prix du Jury, Cannes 1976
After the harrowing death of her mother, little Ana finds her cheating father dead in bed with a married lover. Frosty Aunt Paulina arrives to look after the young girl and her two sisters. The all-female household is completed by the girls’ mute grandmother and a feisty housekeeper.
« Saura's beautifully acted, haunting Spanish movie. A work of marvellous moments and two superb performances, by Miss Torrent and by Miss Chaplin, who has never before in a film that I've seen so thoroughly realized herself as an actress. » (The New York Times)
« A political and psychological masterpiece. This unrepentantly arthouse film was the sixth-biggest grosser of the year and Spanish audiences clearly had no problem decoding Cría cuervos's historical allegory and relating its individual, even idiosyncratic, vision to their wider, collective concerns at a unique moment when the nation was at a crossroads. As Saura shows, in 1976 Spaniards looked back in fear and forward with uncertainty. Still as moving and compelling as when it was made, the film seems now not diminished but enhanced by its growing distance in time, benefiting from a retrospective perspective that, appropriately enough, is subtly explored within the film itself. » (Criterion)
