Ariadna Gil

Young photographer Andrés plans to marry his girlfriend, Alicia, but everything changes when he’s mugged by two women on the street. He becomes obsessed with one of his attackers, a beautiful but mentally ill woman named Isabel.Read More »

A woman uncovers some unsettling truths about her country and its history in this drama from Spain. Lola (Ariadna Gil) is a writer who feels creatively stifled and hasn’t been able to work out a new idea in months. Looking for something to clear her creative block, She takes an assignment to write a piece about Rafael Sanchez Mazas (Ramon Fontsere), a writer who sided with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. While legend has it Mazas was killed by Republican troops, the truth is he was given protection and shelter by Friends of the Forest, a group of men who lived in the woods. As Lola tries to search out Joaquim Figueras, one of the last surviving Friends of the Forest, she discovers a soldier who captured Mazas and was prepared to shoot him, but opted to let him go at the last moment. As Lola’s writer’s block dissolves, she digs deeper in search of the truth about this elusive man and his mysterious actions during the war. Soldados de Salamina was based on a true story and the real-life Joaquim Figueras appears in the film, along with several other people who took part in the shelter and capture of Mazas. From AllMovieRead More »

Quote:
Even though Pedro Almodóvar was a major creative force in blowing away the severity of the Franco years, his films – like “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” – still caused shock-horror in the Spanish heartland. “Second Skin”, though by another director (Gerardo Vera), will almost certainly do likewise. Like Almodóvar, Gerardo Vera kicks aside the Catholic certainties of conservative Spain as he delineates the instability of a marriage, specifically caused by a husband who is torn between his wife and another man.Read More »

In 1944 falangist Spain, a girl, fascinated with fairy-tales, is sent along with her pregnant mother to live with her new stepfather, a ruthless captain of the Spanish army. During the night, she meets a fairy who takes her to an old faun in the center of the labyrinth. He tells her she’s a princess, but must prove her royalty by surviving three gruesome tasks. If she fails, she will never prove herself to be the the true princess and will never see her real father, the king, again.Read More »

Review
Highly stylized
Noted Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein (Deep Crimson) presents a highly stylized, almost stagebound, erotic melodrama about life in the 1940s in Mexico (filmed in the lush style of 1940s melodramas). It’s based on the story by Max Aub and penned by Alicia Paz Garciadiego. The narrative is in the form of a repetitious parable that is overlong, hitting many dull spots and at times insufferable to watch. It stays on message to show a series of themes (colonialism, class warfare, racial and idealogical divisions and revolutionary fervor in both Franco’s Spain and Mexico) based on real historical events and combines it with the fictional story of the willing enslavement to the upper-class of the peasant Indian Mexican named Nacho (Luis Felipe Tovar).
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