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Daniela Fejerman and Elvira Lindo’s “Someone Who Takes Care of Me,” a celebration of actors, their passion, craft and historical legacy, opened this year’s Malaga Film Festival in a fitting tribute to the Spanish entertainment industry.

The film, which screened out of competition, centers on three women whose careers have spanned stage, film and television, actresses of different generations whose fortunes in life have greatly differed and who struggle with untold secrets and unresolved conflicts.

Aura Garrido stars as Nora, a young, award-winning actress with a promising future who carefully balances between the two main pillars in her life, her grandmother Lilith (Magüi Mira), who reigned for decades as a renowned theater star, and her mother Cecilia (Emma Suárez), whose career has languished after having achieved some glory in the 1980s, a decade of excess in which she heavily partook.

As Nora experiences success in her burgeoning career,...

The festival is an important stopping point for directors including Carla Simon and Alauda Ruiz de Azúa.

Malaga film festival director Juan Antonio Vigar is ready for the curtain to rise on his 10th edition in charge of the Andalucian event.

The world premiere of Someone To Look After Me (Alguien Que Cuide De Mí ), novelist Elvira Lindo’s debut as a film director, will open the festival tonight, screening out of competition. It will close on March 19 with the world premiere of Paz Jiménez’s Como Dios Manda, also playing out of competition.

Vigar has programmed a competition line-up...

Spain’s fast-growing TV production company Mediacrest is joining forces with Wanda Vision, one of the country’s top arthouse distributors-producers, on docu-filmmaker Gerardo Olivares’ project “Lonely Man.”

The Mediacrest-Wanda deal will see Wanda Vision’s partners José María and Miguel Morales assuming co-producers roles, handling an undisclosed part of project distribution rights.

“Lonely Man” represents Olivares’ return to the docu-fiction genre, a territory he already visited in two previous Wanda-produced projects, international sales hit “La Gran Final” and multi-prized feature “14 kilómetros.”

Both titles allowed Olivares to introduce fictional elements that helped the stories to progress within a real environment and characters.

In the case of “Lonely Man,” located in the Río Negro province in Argentina’s Patagonia, Olivares tells the story of Cándido Sandoval, a 70-year-old gaucho who lives alone in a cabin isolated from the world.

“This is a very personal project that arose after my travels...

Spain’s Mediacrest, one of its fastest-rising independent TV production-distribution houses, has attached Spanish novelist Elvira Lindo to adapt Spanish novel “Nada,” one of the greatest modern classics written after Spain’s Civil War.

Lindo is joining Daniel Domenjó, Mediacrest managing director, and Alberto Macías, the company’s head of fiction, to present the drama series makeover at a Conecta Fiction panel this Wednesday, entitled Nada, the Challenge of Adapting a Literary Icon.

The title of the round table pretty well sums up the adaptation’s largest challenge. “Nada” won Spain’s Nadal Prize, one of its biggest literary awards, in 1944 when Laforet was just 23. The novel turns on Andrea, a Laforet alter-ego, who arrives at her grandmother’s house in 1939 in Barcelona to study at the university, soon after the end of the Spanish Civil War which the city lost to dictator Francisco Franco.

Though her family supported the Civil War’s victors,...

Los Angeles and Mexico City-based studio Exile Content has teamed up with Spanish journo Ana Pastor’s media company Newtral to produce long-form unscripted premium content in Spanish and English. The joint venture’s first project is a documentary series about the genesis of the first-ever women’s soccer team at Real Madrid, Spain’s most renowned soccer team and winner of the FIFA World Cup a record-breaking four times.

Spurred by the growing interest in women’s soccer — especially after the 2019 Women’s World Cup triumph of the U.S. soccer team led by Megan Rapinoe and in Spain, where Spanish female soccer teams at rivals Atletico Madrid and Barca played to a record-busting crowd of 60,000 — Real Madrid opted to absorb Club Deportivo Tacon, a small neighborhood women’s soccer club in Madrid.

The docuseries, co-directed by Pastor and Alfonso Cortes-Cavanillas, has been chronicling, since September, the trials and...

Madrid — Burgeoning Hispanic film and TV studio Exile Content, headed by former Univision and Televisa chief creative officer Isaac Lee, has struck an agreement with Spanish publishing house Planeta and Spanish author Elvira Lindo to create a Spanish-language TV series based on Lindo’s most famous creation, Manolito Gafotas.

The move is many ways marks Exile apart as a Los Angeles, Miami and Mexico based studio which is challenging Spanish companies on their home turf for a slice of prestige, highly popular IP.

Developed as a comedic monolog by author Lindo for a radio program in the 1990s, Manolito Gafotas typifies the combination of popular entertainment and social critique which runs through much of the best of Spanish movies and TV shows.

First published in 1994, the now eight Manolito Gafotas novels turn on a chubby, miopic, glass-wearing kid young enough to use expressions which suggest an innocence -“his worldwide...

It’s only February, yet The Criterion Collection has already released two exceptional screwball comedies this 2017. The first, His Girl Friday, released last month (and reviewed by David Blakeslee here), is a film that comes to mind whenever the term “screwball comedy” is bandied about. The second is Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Almodóvar, particularly at this early point in his career, was better known for dark comedies that did all they could to confront and provoke and remind everyone that with the demise of Franco’s regime Almodóvar intended to utilize a newly discovered freedom of expression, so the film’s provenance, combined with the film’s dark premise, means that the delirious, escalating light comedy of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown will come as a surprise (a pleasant surprise, I think) to first-time watchers familiar with the rest of Almodóvar’s work.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 855

1988 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 89 min. / Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date February 21, 2017 / 39.95

Starring Carmen Maura, Fernando Guillén, Antonio Banderas, Julieta Serrano, Rossy de Palma, María Barranco, Kiti Manver, Guillermo Montesinos, Chus Lampreave, Yayo Calvo, Loles León, Ángel de Andrés López, José Antonio Navarro.

Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine

Film Editor: José Salcedo

Original Music: Bernardo Bonezzi

Produced by: Augustin Almodóvar

Written and Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Connected film festival attendees learned about Pedro Almodóvar before everybody else, especially if they had an understanding of new developments in Spanish cinema. Film school had shown us nothing but the very exceptional work of Luis Buñuel, most of which is really from Mexico and France. In the 1980s we Angelenos were just getting access to films by the old-school ‘traditional’ rebel Spaniards Carlos Saura and Juan Antonio Bardem.

Update: The Before Trilogy on Criterion is currently $39.95. Pre-order while you can.

After The Criterion Collection hinted at it and some of the own crew confirmed it, it’s now been officially revealed that one of their most-requested releases will be arriving next year. Richard Linklater‘s Before trilogy will be joining the colelction just a few weeks after Valentine’s Day, on February 28th, featuring new 2K restorations of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset as well as Before Midnight.

Special features include a new discussion with Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke, moderated by Kent Jones, and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s documentary on the making of the most recent feature. There’s also the full feature-length documentary Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny, and more. While we’re still waiting on cover art for the Linklater set, check out the full details on February’s line-up below, also including one...