Fernando Arrabal

The Spanish Civil War, as experienced by the town of Villa Ramiro. The local count and his Fascist nephews ally with the rebels; the count’s son, indifferent to politics at the outset, later makes a choice; the town’s teacher, Antonio Garcia, a pacifist, tries not to take sides but to inspire the children with ideas; a beautiful eccentric woman, Vandale, brings leadership and strength to the town; dwarfs long for equality. The fictive story of Villa Ramiro is inter-cut with archival footage of the war itself. The town is near Guernica, and the local Republicans draw inspiration from its freedom tree.Read More »

At the end of the Spanish civil war, Fando, a boy of about ten, tries to make sense of war and his father’s arrest. His mother is religious, sympathetic to the Fascists; his father is accused of being a Red. Fando discovers that his mother may have aided in his father’s arrest. Sometimes we witness Fando imagining explanations for what’s going on; sometimes we see him at play, alone or with his friend Thérèse. Oedipal fantasies and a lad’s natural curiosity about sex and death mix with his search for his mother’s nature and his father’s fate. Will Fando survive the search?Read More »

Cult Epics wrote:
Civil war is an act of cannibalism. It is the rending of a nation’s own flesh, the final act in a spiral of devolution towards base subversion. It is brother vs. brother, mother vs. father. It is as psychologically traumatizing as it is physically brutal and the scars left by a civil war don’t heal clean, they arre ragged, gaping wounds that fester and bloom. In Spain, the wounds of civil war sprouted around a single tree: the Guernica Tree.Read More »