Joan Enric Lahosa

En attendant de se lancer dans la production de son long métrage Liberxina 90 (1970), Carlos Duran tourne ce court métrage (avec le soutien très expressif de plusieurs professeurs de l'Escuela de Barcelona) : une satire sinistrement colorée de la société moderne en tant que telle, et de son espagnol fasciste. "L'intrusion dans la vie privée d'un être humain, des tendances distinctes qui existent dans la société dans laquelle nous vivons, jusqu'à ce qu'elles tombent dans le chaos." Carlos Durán

Documentary by Joaquím Jordá, part of the Barcelona School.

This film turns on two basic axes: the inquiry into ways of cinematographic representation and a critical image of official Spain at the time of the Franco dictatorship. “Montage of attractions” and Brechtianism in strong doses. Umbracle is made up of fragments (some are archive footage) that resound rather than progress by unusual links, with dejá vu scenes that promise us more but remain tensely unfinished. Jonathan Rosembaun said: “few directors since Resnais have played so ruthlessly with the unconscious narrative expectations to bug us”. Learning from the feeling of strangeness caused by Rossellini as he threw well known actors into savage scenery in southern Europe. Portabella makes Christopher Lee wander around a dream-like Barcelona. Without a doubt Portabella’s most structurally complex and most profoundly political film, that is ferociously poetic.

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.