Begin the Beguine

Antonio Miguel Albajara is a writer who left the country after the Civil War and worked at a university in America. After receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature he returns to the city where he was born, Gijón. He takes a hotel room, walks the streets, goes to his old school and the stadium, and looks for the woman of his youth. There is something he tells nobody: only he knows why he is making this journey now. José Luis Garci's film won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1983, the first Spanish film to do so. The English title comes from the Cole Porter song heard again and again in it. The telling is built not on event but on return: it shows what coming back from exile meant in post-Franco Spain, without blaming anyone. Antonio Ferrandis is in the lead. When it came out in Spain some critics found it too sentimental.