Opening session of the Luis García Berlanga retrospective, with screenings of the films “Welcome, Mr. Marshall! (1953)”, his first solo feature, and the short film “The Teacher's Dream (2002)”, his last film. These two works by the Spanish auteur frame the beginning and end of his filmography, "separated" for censorship reasons. The Teacher's Dream will be screened for the first time in Portugal.

2 MAR | DOM | 17:00

¡BIENVENIDO, MISTER MARSHALL! | WELCOME, MR. MARSHALL!

Luis García Berlanga | ESP | 1953 | 78’

Luis García Berlanga's first solo feature, Welcome, Mister Marshall! is one of the must-see titles and one of the gateways to modernism in Spanish cinema. Berlanga establishes many of the figures and concerns that would populate his work. Set in Villar del Rio, a village in Andalusia that is preparing to welcome US diplomats and military forces who have helped rebuild the country thanks to the Marshall Plan, the inhabitants make every effort to welcome their American guests, in a mixture of hospitality and subservience. But Spanish and American cultures clash head-on, generating countless misunderstandings and embarrassments, exposing the ridiculousness and fragility of Francoist Spain's political and social structures. Innovative for the way it broke with some of the ossified tendencies of Spanish cinema at the time, the film's proximity to the reality of the time is even more significant if we bear in mind that Spain had just approved, through a referendum in 1947, the law of succession, which allowed Franco to appoint himself head of state for life.

EL SUEÑO DE LA MAESTRA | THE TEACHER'S DREAM

Luis García Berlanga | ESP | 2002 | 13’

This short film, Luis García Berlanga's last work, is based on an original scene from his first film Welcome, Mister Marshall!, which never came into being due to censorship. In the film, a teacher shows the various forms of execution, from the electric chair to the garrote, using the students to demonstrate the workings of each of these death machines. Having finally managed to stage this episode, impossible in the context of the dictatorship, Berlanga replaces the teacher Eloisa from Welcome, Mister Marshall!, representative of public order and a figure of state education, with a sadomasochistic teacher who, in a classroom where Franco's portrait still presides, gives free rein to her fantasies, fulfilling a dream that is a nightmare for the students.