For Spanish cinema, 2023 has been a year of reunions (Ana Torrent), comebacks (JA Bayona) and great diversity: the list of highlights of the year includes fantasy animations, post-war horror, lost comedians and black comedy. and direct or indirect forays into westerns.
‘The Fantastic Golem Tale’ by Burnin’ Percebes
What happens if a man falls off a terrace and literally breaks into a thousand pieces, as if he were made of clay? The duo Burnin’ Percebes gives us a few answers based on the legend of the Jewish Golem.
‘They know it’, David Trueba
After examining the interiors of the Pujol Ferrusola family in a miniseries, David Trueba writes a biography of comedian Eugenio, a very different Catalan, showing both his achievements and his dark areas.
‘Ruta rescue’ by Marc Recha
A tragic past in the Balkans, a dead woman, two gangsters and a small plane. Recha returns with a film that is visually rich, shot in a region of Cerdanya, and creates an intriguing mix between thriller and western.
‘Arrival (At the Entrance)’ by Alejandro Rojas and Juan Sebastián Vásquez
The film ‘On Entry’, directed by two first-time directors, tells the journey of a couple from Barcelona and Venezuela who are interrogated in the immigration area of the New York airport.
‘Snow Society’ by JA Bayona
Juan Antonio Bayona’s vision of the 1972 Andes aerial tragedy differs from the previous two both in the style of shooting and the importance given to the dead.
‘Sister Death’ from Paco Plaza
A new development in the relationship between nuns and horror movies. Genre expert Paco Plaza describes the troubles of a novice with powers who teaches at a girls’ school in the post-war period.
‘Robot Dreams’ by Pablo Berger
Pablo Berger, a rather restless filmmaker who animated Torremolinos in 1973 and made a silent version of ‘Snow White’, proposes a whimsical animated story between a New York dog and his robot friend.
‘Creatura’ by Elena Martín
Director and actress Elena Martín’s second feature film focuses on three different periods of the same character: childhood, adolescence and maturity. She is a woman trying to investigate herself to find out why she has lost the concept of sexual desire.
‘The Strange Lifestyle’ of Pedro Almodóvar
Almodóvar started making short films and now feels comfortable with this format again. According to Cocteau’s writing, after ‘The Human Voice’, here he adopts the case of a western in which two men are romantically reunited. Short, content, emotional and scenic.
‘Especially at night’, Víctor Iriarte
The film has a tense atmosphere, an epistolary story style, absurd comedy touches, various visual forms and always a painful theme: stolen children. A boy and his two mothers, with whom he has lived his entire life, believing the other to be dead, embark on a shared transcendent adventure. The face-to-face encounter between Lola Dueñas and Ana Torrent in this second film of Basque director Víctor Iriarte is interesting, it is the first film with a more narrative approach.
The list of the best Spanish films of the year was prepared with the votes of Quim Casas, Desirée de Fez, Juan Manuel Freire, Nando Salvà and Rafael Tapounet.