Cousin Angelica

Luis, middle-aged, travels from Barcelona to Segovia to bury his mother's remains in the family vault. He stays in his aunt's old house, where he had also spent the summer of 1936. In the house he finds his cousin Angélica, the girl he loved as a child; she now lives there with her husband and her daughter. From the moment Luis walks in, past and present run into each other and the civil war years come back. Carlos Saura shoots the scenes of the past with the adult actor: José Luis López Vázquez plays the child Luis as well. That one decision builds the whole effect, because the man is not remembering his childhood, he is still living inside it. The production caused an uproar in Spain in 1974; extreme right groups attacked screenings and the press reacted hard. It was one of the biggest arguments a film caused in the last years of the Franco period. It took the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.