Valentina

Antonio José Betancor’s 1982 film adapts Ramón J. Sender’s novel Crónica del alba. In a French internment camp in 1939, José Garcés of the defeated Spanish Republican army keeps his fellow prisoners going by telling them about the year he was eight, 1911, in a small town in north-eastern Spain: a boy who baffled his father, was in constant trouble, and was in love with Valentina from next door. He signals to her from the roof at night, writes poems, and gets them both into serious trouble by killing her father’s breeding pigeons. Anthony Quinn plays the sympathetic priest who tells him about saints, heroes and poets. Jorge Sanz plays the boy.