Arrebato

This year, Spain is celebrating 50 years of La Movida, the cultural liberation movement that erupted after General Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 and which reached its apotheosis in the Madrid underground movement’s productions by liberated filmmakers, artists, designers, club owners and playwrights with Pedro Almodóvar (1949) and his troop of actors as its most prominent exponents.

In Arrebato, José Sirgado, a B-movie horror director and junkie, wanders the city’s mean streets. He is depressed, he is trapped by his addiction and there seems little hope of a way out. One night, he meets the enigmatic Pedro, an eccentric young filmmaker who takes his Super8 camera everywhere. He obsessively records life, in fact he positively hoovers it up – the camera becoming a vampiric portal that transports everything his lens captures to a different, cinematic dimension.

Eye is screening four films of La Movida: Arrebato (1980), Pepi, Luci, Bom..., Matador (Almodóvar) and Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait (Pons Ventura). On Tuesday 2 December a roundtable discussion wil be held entitled Movida - 50th anniversary of the Spanish Transition Cinema. On Sunday, December 7, Pedro Almodóvar will be at Eye for a Conversation with Tilda Swinton. The screenings are organised in collaboration with the Embassy of Spain in the Netherlands.