Monday, August 25------Although it is not an official sidebar to the Festival, the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival is highlighting a dozen new films from Spain. In fact, Spain is the European country most represented at the Festival which opens in two weeks. With a mix of straight-out Spanish productions and a host of co-productions with Latin American partners, the accent is on the continued vitality and strong international impression of contemporary Spanish cinema."This is a...

Although it is not an official sidebar to the Festival, the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival is highlighting a dozen new films from Spain. In fact, Spain is the European country most represented at the Festival which opens in two weeks. With a mix of straight-out Spanish productions and a host of co-productions with Latin American partners, the accent is on the continued vitality and strong international impression of contemporary Spanish cinema."This is an especially exciting year f...

The Sunday morning festival reports in the Spanish papers, whose writers represent a cross-section of leading Spanish film critics, were nearly unanimous in denouncing the prizes dished out the day before by the Angelica Huston led official competition jury. The main prize, which went to the Czech film "Something Like Happiness", came in for the strongest condemnation. Three critics used the word "absurdo" (absurd) to describe the top award, one going so far as to say that there were at least e...

The Donostia-San Sebastian film festival on the incredibly picturesque North Spanish coast, ("NAZIOARTEKO ZINEMALDIA" in the exotic Basque language of the region), has opened heavily "front loaded" as the saying goes these days, which means that many of the big guns, films with high prize potential, have already been fired off in the first few days. The festival opener was, appropriately, "Obaba", one of the most eagerly awaited Spanish films of the year based on a Basque language best seller b...