Even though the adjective 'Almodovar-like', which is often used for Spanish filmmakers who follow the twisted esthetics of Pedro Almodovar, is already a bit worn out, the protagonist of the documentary Ignasi M by Ventura Pons has come the closets to the gallery of eccentric charters often found in the director’s films. Nevertheless, Pons’ queer (Food For Love, Amic/Amat) has nothing in common with the crazy Pedro. But as we listen to the author’s good-humored protagonist – Catalan curator Ignasio Millet Bonaventura – in his introductory monologue, we learn that he drinks 29 pills daily – from anti-depressants to HIV treatments and Viagra (the latest, he ironically admits, in order to salvage the damage caused by other medicines to his “lower” and “most important” parts of his body). As we follow him while he shops for sex toys in the manner of a true shopping queen, we might think that Ignasi M. lost his way and came from Almodovar’s corpus. Especially as he speaks about his grown-up sons: one who is a graphic designer and animator living in London and the other a born-again Christian who discovered the charm of evangelism, even though both of them grew up with their father’s lesbian friend stuck to a wheel chair.

Besides Pons’ film, this program of current Spanish films, brings another excellent documentary - Las maestras de la Republica directed by Pilar Perez Solano. This film about the role of teachers during the Spanish Second Republic as a personification of socialist ideals about free, public and secular education and women who were advocators of school unions and treatment of motherhood as an incentive and not a duty, owes a lot to Ken Loach’s rhetoric. The role played by the British prime minister Clement Attlee in relation to the long era of Tories sublimated in the tyranny of the Iron lady in Loach’s documentary The Spirit of '45, is the same role that these brave women held in relation to the tyranny of Franco’s regime that after the Civil War tore down everything that they have built and gave even more power to the influence of church over schools.

Other films from this program share the pronounced documentary and hybrid note, which coincides well with the recent statement by Godard: “All great feature films turn to documentaries such as all great documentaries turn to feature films”. In the film La plaga (The Plague) by the Catalan director Neus Ballus, the hybrid methodology is apparent in the pronounced esthetics and formal refinement, while the author follows the protagonists who are choking on the edges of Barcelona – a wrestler who immigrated from Moldavia, lost owner of a farm, sick old lady, her nurse from the Philippines and an aging prostitute who is having more and more trouble finding clients. They are all trying to tear down the wall of loneliness in vain. However, the author’s distanced style does not want to count on empathy. Fernando Franco went even further in his debut Wounded (La herida). It follows the gradual descent and the lonely paranoia of a psychotic girl (portrayed by the great Marian Alvarez who won an award in San Sebastian as best actress), her self-wounding and SMS communication with a boy with whom she signed a suicide pact, even though her invisible scars, those on her soul, are much bigger and more painful. Where Franco puts the emphasis on the claustrophobia of the shots in a series of close-ups accompanied by hysterical movements of an unstill camera that follows the girl’s footsteps, Gabriel Velazquez (Artico) observes from a distance the wide vastness of Salamanca, whose idyll is disturbed by the white smoke coming from a near-by refinery. It is a place where sixteen-year-old boys become fathers, steal cattle, bully younger kids, snort cocaine and speak very little, even though their static compositions speak a lot (some of the characters are recurring one from the author’s previous film Iceberg).

The focus is on the youth as well in the documentary drama Black Diamonds by Miguel Alcantudo- It deals with the topic of sales of soccer players who come from the countries of the Third world and their transformation into slaves. We follow two boys from Mali who became an easy target of a soccer agent, while they try to escape their home country and move to Spain to become famous soccer players. 'Solo futbol!', says one of them. For them soccer is the only goal and represents everything in their lives. But their ball as well as the one from the film Artico with the message 'You will be a grandmother!', which was thrown by Jota across the prison wall where his mother was detained for dealing drugs, seems to be on the way to the same social goal. (Dragan Rubeša)