Long Live Death

Fernando Arrabal's 1971 debut adapts his own autobiographical novel and is set at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Fando, about ten years old, tries to make sense of the war and of his father's arrest; his mother is religious and sympathetic to the fascists, his father is accused of being a Red. The boy discovers that his mother may have helped arrange the arrest. Arrabal was a founder of the panic theatre movement, and that determines the film's form: fantasy sections shot through coloured filters and built on nightmare logic are cut between the real scenes. The animal slaughter, torture and religious imagery in those passages are extremely graphic and disturbing. The film was banned in Franco's Spain and shot in France. Who it's for: viewers interested in experimental cinema, panic theatre and artistic treatments of the Spanish Civil War. Who it's not for: anyone avoiding real animal slaughter and images of torture, or who will not accept an artistic justification for graphic violence.