Wednesday 19 March at 19:15

Carlos Saura's masterpiece revisits religion, marriage and death through the eyes of a child. In addition to being an uncanny drama of family dysfunction, it is also a historical parable about the end of Francoism. Nine-year-old orphan Anna is haunted by the deaths of her father, a brutal army officer, and her mistreated mother. The child could represent the entire younger generation of Spain, brutally abused by the Franco regime. However, Saura could well have been addressing Europe in general and the refusal to acknowledge that his country was an ideological and military testing ground for Nazi Germany and whose unapologetic fascism prevailed for many years after the Second World War. Filmed shortly before Franco's death, the film provoked the fury of the regime's military and the vice-president of the government, Santiago Díaz de Mendívil.

Introduction by Elena Pérez-Villanueva del Caz, Counsellor at the Embassy of Spain