"Spanish cinema is a centre-piece of Spanish contemporary culture.  From Luis Buñuel’s mid-century masterpieces to Almodóvar’s “fin-de-siècle” follies, cinema has been both a tool to understand the evolution of Spanish society and a mirror to examine ourselves. " Thus spake Gustavo de Arístegui, Spain's Ambassador in India at the 46th IFFI in Goa. "Given the already existing interest in Spain (interest ...

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...

Viggo Mortenson in ALAISTRE Thursday, December 7-----The high profile being brought to contemporary Spanish cinema by the international successes of Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER and Guillermo del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH (both screened to audience acclaim at the 2006 New York Film Festival) has only stimulated the interest of international filmgoers to explore deeper into the prolific Spanish cinema scene. Giving New Yorkers a sampling of the blazing talents currently at work in Spain is the ...

Wednesday, September 27----Magical realism meets gothic fairy tale in Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro's most ambitious film yet, PAN'S LABYRINTH, which has been chosen to close the 44th edition of the New York Film Festival . The film mixes surrealistic fantasy with harsh reality in the tale of a young girl who travels with her mother and adoptive father to a rural area in northern Spain during the first years of the repressive Franco regime. To cope with the hardships of everyday life, th...