Posted 16 February 2023
On Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th March, the ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival, Manchester, will host the UK première of a feature-length film, a medium-length film and a short by Spanish director Cecilia Bartolomé, ¡Vámonos, Bárbara! (1978), Margarita y el lobo (1969) and Carmen de Carabanchel (1965) . Each screening will be introduced by members of the Leading Women Project team, Professor Sally Faulkner and Professor Nuria Triana-Toribio, the Principal Investigator and one of the Co-Investigators of the project, and followed by Round Table discussions. Now in its 29th year, ¡Viva! is an annual celebration of Spanish and Latin American culture, with a programme of the most exciting cinema from across the Spanish-speaking world.
Director and screenwriter Cecilia Bartolomé is considered one of the most transgressive women filmmakers of her time. While enrolled in Spain’s Official Film School in the 1960s, Bartolomé made the medium-length and short films included in our programme, which focus on the challenges women faced under the regressive regime, but always with a strong sense of irony and humour. She graduated in 1969 with Margarita y el lobo (1969), a film censored by the Franco regime for its challenging and irreverent feminist subject matter. It was only after the death of Franco in 1975 and return of democracy that Bartolomé was able to make the feature film ¡Vámonos, Bárbara! (1978).
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Saturday 25th March, 16:15 – ¡Vámonos, Bárbara!
(Dir Cecilia Bartolomé/ES 1978/95 mins)
Ana – a wife, mother, and advertising executive in her forties, with a comfortable life in a bourgeois Catalan family – rips up the rulebook when she decides to inject some truth into her existence and take back control of her life. To the horror of her family, Ana decides to leave her husband and heads off on a road trip to the coast, taking her 12-year- old daughter Bárbara with her. Down by the sea, conventions melt away as Ana enjoys her newfound freedom.
Sunday 26th March, 13:45- Carmen de Carabanchel
(Dir Cecilia Bartolomé/ ES 1965/15mins)
A comic short about women’s lack of reproductive rights in 1960s Spain. Set in the working-class Madrid barrio of Carabanchel, it features non-professional actors and uses contemporary music and versions of Bizet’s compositions as an irreverent commentary on the restrictions imposed by church and state.
Sunday 26th March, 14:00 – Margarita y el lobo
(Dir Cecilia Bartolomé/ ES 1969/45mins)
Hailed by critics as Spain’s ‘first feminist film’, Bartolomé’s fusion of female subjectivity and comedy looks forward to future feminist film and writing, especially British writer Angela Carter’s 1979 re-writing of the fairy tale. A medium-length piece from her final-year of Film School, the film was banned at the time thanks to the combined forces of Francoism and sexism. Sally Faulkner’s article on this film, published last year in Feminist Media Studies, is free to read on-line at: ttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2022.2126873
For tickets, and the full festival programme see: https://cog-home.ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/app/uploads/2023/02/03123402/HOME_viva-v5-1.pdf
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¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Festival is produced by HOME and the Greater Manchester Arts Centre, with the support of the Embassy of Spain in London, MUBI and the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery. The festival is curated by Rachel Hayward, Head of Film Strategy, Jessie Gibbs, ¡Viva! Festival Coordinator, and Andy Willis, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford and HOME’s Senior Visiting Curator: Film. With additional programme support from the Instituto Cervantes, the Leading Women project, and the Invisible Women archive activist film collective.
Leading Women in Portuguese and Spanish Cinema and Television,1970-1980