Spanish film premiering in Cuba exposes trauma over stolen babies

Havana, Dec 14 (RHC) The trauma over the thousands of stolen babies in Spain gives body to the story of the film "Sobre todo de noche," a debut feature film that premieres today at the 44th edition of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema.

The film, part of the Other Latitudes section, will be shown along with 16 other works in the International Contemporary Panorama as part of the official selection of the event, which runs in Havana until December 17.

Directed by Víctor Iriarte and starring actresses Lola Dueñas and Ana Torren, the film takes place between 1940 and 1990 and presents two mothers, one biological and the other adoptive, a son in common and a reunion to review the history of their lives.

Critics describe this film as an epistolary chronicle articulated in chapters that correspond to the letters of the protagonists, whose voice-over complements the narrative.

This co-production of Spain, Portugal and France is divided into three chapters and an epilogue, and will be seen this Wednesday at the Acapulco movie theater in the capital.

It premiered at the Venice Film Festival during the Days of the Authors section. Then, it went through Seminci, Mar del Plata and other film events and now arrives for the first time in the Cuban capital, catalogued in previous reviews as a deep and visceral, as well as hypnotic and enigmatic film.

According to the Spanish portal Fotogramas, "Sobre todo de noche" is a denunciation film about the issue of stolen babies in Spain between the 40s and the 90s, but the film by its director Iriarte is far from being a typical denunciation film.

It is a challenging exercise in creative freedom, experimental, that flirts with both realistic and dreamlike images.

And it is tangentially inscribed in the thriller (revenge, heist), in the road movie, in the epistolary story, in the bucolic picture, and all this between Madrid, the Basque Country and Portugal, said the source.

The associations estimate that some 300,000 babies were stolen in the aforementioned period in Spain, and the perpetrators did it, above all, at night.

The film, a mutant and mysterious jewel that begins with the voice-over of Lola Dueñas, who plays Vera, is based on this newspaper headline, citing reviews of Iriarte's film, which also motivate viewers eager for risky aesthetic and conceptual proposals to see it in theaters (Source: Prensa Latina).