Fernando Trueba Movies

A veteran journalist and a pretty young student get an intimate glimpse at the generational gap that divides them as their country struggles with great social and political turmoil in this drama from Chico and Rita director Fernando Trueba. When Miguel sits down with Ángela in a Madrid café, the eager student hopes to get an interview for a class project, while the celebrated journalist think only of seduction. Later, as the tensions in the street seem to rise with the mercury in the thermometer, the two somehow find themselves trapped together naked in a bathroom. Their repeated cries for rescue unheard by the outside world, Miguel and Ángela gradually enter into an intricate psychological struggle in which the balance of power continually shifts between the wise old reporter and the hungry young truth-seeker. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Two men unlucky in both love and larceny try to change their fates under unfortunate circumstances in this drama adapted from a novel by Antonio Skarmeta. Following the end of Pinochet's rule in Chile, a large number of prisoners are given amnesty, and after five years behind bars, master safecracker Nico (Ricardo Darin) is allowed to go free. Nico wants little more than to see his family and live a quiet life, and he has no interest in returning to a life of crime. But Nico learns that his wife Teresa (Ariadna Gil) has started a new life and has no interest in seeing him again, leaving him uncertain about his future. Angel (Abel Ayala) is a younger ex-con who served alongside Nico and has plans to steal a cache of loot that was hidden before he was arrested for petty theft; he tries to recruit Nico to help him with the heist, and with no clear future Nico reluctantly agrees. As Nico and Angel map out plans for the robbery, Angel finds himself falling in love with Victoria (Miranda Bodenhofer), a beautiful but troubled former balled dancer who has been left mute by the horrors she saw under Pinochet's dictatorship. Unknown to Angel, his days may be numbered -- he knows some ugly secrets about Santoro (Julio Jung), the prison's warden who has sent a man out to silence him forever. El Baile de la Victoria (aka The Dancer and the Thief) was the first dramatic feature in nine years from director Fernando Trueba, after devoting close to a decade to documentaries about music. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

With his gentle ensemble comedy Bienvenido a casa (aka Welcome Home), Spanish director David Trueba meditates on one man's passage from youth to the emotional maturity of adulthood. In the process, Trueba takes a wise and reflective look at the dynamics of contemporary relationships, romantic and otherwise. Alejo Sauras is Samuel, an aspiring photographer who makes the broad leap from his rural village in the Spanish countryside -- where he lives under the thumb of his domineering mother -- to the wonderland of urban Madrid. He moves in with his girlfriend, Eva (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), and accepts a position as resident photojournalist for a local culture magazine, where his eccentric colleagues include a slightly embittered, blind movie critic (with a blind guide dog), a burnt-out sports columnist, and a depressed vocalist/instrumentalist who pens the music column. Through the various employees, Trueba reveals a spectrum of attitudes toward love and romance. The remainder of the story finds Samuel teaming up with the magazine's reporter, Sandra, for an investigative story on a murder related to human trafficking. Meanwhile, Samuel begins to grapple, privately, with problems in his marital life -- specifically, how to preserve the love, romance, and devotion he feels for Eva (and she for him). Samuel's watchful mother cautions him not to repeat the same mistakes that she once made -- but the past comes back to haunt Samuel in the guise of a fateful encounter with a childhood friend, Nieves. Then, suddenly, Eva announces her pregnancy. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Fernando Trueba's El Embrujo de Shanghai (The Shanghai Spell) is a drama set just after the Spanish Civil War. Dani (Fernando Tielve) is a 14-year-old would-be artist who is hired to care for the elderly Captain Blay (Fernando Fernán Gómez). Blay convinces the young boy to paint Susanna (Aida Folch), a young woman from the local village. Susanna's father, Kim (Antonio Resines), is a rarely seen but beloved resistance figure, while her mother, Anita (Ariadna Gil), is considered the sexiest woman in town. One of Kim's associates shows up and begins an affair with Kim, while the two teenagers begin a tentative first romance with each other. The film is adapted from a novel by Juan Marse. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

Post-Franco filmmaker Fernando Trueba's first Spanish-based feature since 1993's Oscar-winning Belle Epoque, La Nina de Tus Ojos begins in 1938, when Spain is torn by Civil War. As a sign of cordiality between General Franco and Adolph Hitler, a Spanish film crew is invited to Nazi Germany's UFA Studios in Berlin to make two versions of a popular Andalusian musical. The cast includes sexy, golden-hearted Macarena (Penélope Cruz), director Blas Fontiveros (Antonio Resines), leading man Julian Torralba (Jorge Sanz), art director Castillo (Santiago Segura) and alcoholic Rosa Rosales (Rosa Maria Sarda). On arrival, they gape at the resplendent shooting facilities, thankful to escape the misery of their war-torn country. However, it is not long before they realize what they have got themselves into, particularly when Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels (Johannes Silberschneider) falls for the Latina charms of Macarena. German actress of Fassbinder fame Hanna Schygulla makes a cameo appearance as the wizened wife of the lustful propaganda minister. La Nina de Tus Ojos competed in the 49th Berlin International Film Festival in 1999. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Rovi

Laura is a Spanish girl who has moved to New York city with the hope of making a new life for herself there. She lives in a junky building in a dangerous neighborhood, and is being hounded by her truly weird landlord to pay the rent of a neighbor of hers, for no discernible reason. Meanwhile, she is attempting to get to know and understand this fabled city, her new home. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

The first half of this ponderous drama shows a six-year-old girl whose life is overshadowed by the impending birth of a baby boy, of whom she is intensely jealous. Some months after he is born, undetected, she quietly smothers him to death. In the second half, she is nineteen and wants to leave the bosom of her family but is financially unable to do so. In the final moments of the film, a melodramatic turn of events fuels a reconciliation between the disaffected young woman and her mother. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

In this documentary, commissioned by the Centre George Pompidou of France, filmmaker Philip Haas explores the religious and artistic activity of four of the world's indigenous peoples. In the first segment, he follows the work of aborigines as they enact a vision from the dreamtime in an earth-painting entitled "The Giant Woman Dreaming." In the next, he goes to another part of Australia to film the making of another aboriginal sacred exertion in the form of a tree-bark painting entitled "The Lightening Man." The third segment takes him to Madagascar to film the messenger sculptures which the local people put on the tombs of relatives, which are said to carry messages back and forth. It is entitled "Young Man's Dream." The last segment explores the significance of images painted in the house of a man living in Papua, New Guinea. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Eschewing a realistic depiction of Franco's Spain in the 1940s, director Fernando Trueba uses a touch of sarcastic humor in painting a 16-year-old's brief stay in a TB sanatorium. Manolo (Jorge Sanz) is one of two brothers who ends up in a tuberculosis sanatorium that is specifically designed for somewhat younger children. Manolo's problem is that he is experiencing the first stirrings of sexual desire and cannot look upon the female nurses and staff with the innocent eyes of the other children. His first overtures to one of the nurses meets with rejection; in fact, the nurse leaves the sanatorium. Manolo really asks for trouble when he falls for another pretty nurse and she herself becomes attracted to him. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

New director Oscar Ladoire has decided to write, direct, and star in his second movie, about a sophisticated director who walks out of the premiere of his latest film, hops in his nifty car, and skedaddles out of town. When he stops at a gas station, he picks up what has come to be derisively known as a "bimbo" -- a woman who cannot speak in any language except that of the streets, who exudes sex with every movement, and who, quite naturally, is ready to go along with the first man who picks her up -- in this case, the upper-crust director. The two set off for Galicia with no particular objective in mind, other than the geographical, and the film follows them on their travels with the same attitude. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi