The Tree of Guernica

L'arbre de Guernica

Italy, France

1975

110 Min

Color

French

Currently 3.6/5 Stars.
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PROD Francesco Cinieri, Ken Legargeant, Gérard Wolf, Bernard Legargeant

CAST Mariangela Melato, Ron Faber, Cosimo Cinieri, Rocco Fontana, Franco Ressel

SOUND Paul Bertault, Fiorenzo Magli

Synopsis

The Spanish Civil War, as experienced by the town of Villa Ramiro. The local count and his Fascist nephews ally with the rebels; the count’s son, indifferent to politics at the outset, later makes a choice; the town’s teacher, Antonio Garcia, a pacifist, tries not to take sides but to inspire the children with ideas; a beautiful eccentric woman, Vandale, brings leadership and strength to the town; dwarfs long for equality. The fictive story of Villa Ramiro is inter-cut with archival footage of the war itself. The town is near Guernica, and the local Republicans draw inspiration from its freedom tree. —IMDb

Director

Fernando Arrabal

Fernando Arrabal Terán (born August 11, 1932 in Melilla, Spain) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist and poet. He settled in France in 1955, he describes himself as “desterrado,” or “half-expatriate, half-exiled.”

Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films; he has published over 100 plays, 14 novels, 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artist’s books; several essays, and his notorious Letter to General Franco during the dictator’s lifetime. His complete plays have been published in a number of languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. The New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the “three avatars of modernism.”

In 1962 Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, inspired by the god Pan, and was elected Transcendant Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique in 1990. Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over… read more