Pont de Varsòvia is dated 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. If the predominant look in Nocturn 29 was that of the upper classes in the sixties, in Pont de Varsòvia we have shining images of the new intellectuals and the amnesic, progressive, European political classes. But beneath that sparking surface of spectacular socio-cultural events and the frivolous life in a happy Europe, lies the tension of broken memories and personal and historical cataclysms. Filmed as meticulously as contemporary comercial cinema, Pont de Varsòvias shatters the plot into a thousand fragments in a European landscape broken by the return of History. It is therefore not strange that two years later Godard should be the author of a sibling film, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero explicitly the heir to Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero in 1947 post-war Europe. —www.pereportabella.com
Since the 1960s, Portabella always maintained a political commitment with all those movements against the Franco dictatorship that supported individual and collective democratic liberties.
In 1977, he was elected Senator in the first democratic elections and he participated in the writing of the present day Spanish Constitution. In 1999, was honoured with the Creu de Sant Jordi, the highest recognition that a person can receive from the institutions of the Generalitat de Catalunya. He has presided over the Fundación Alternativas since 2001.
As a filmmaker Pere Portabella has been a relevant presence in the Spanish film world for the last fifty years. With Films 59, his production company, he fostered some of the most emblematic films in the history of Spanish cinema. Los Golfos by Carlos Saura (1959), El Cochecito by Marco Ferreri (1960) and Viridiana by Luis Buñuel (1961). He directs his own creations combining a heritage of avant-garde culture with breakaway forms of… read more
Mesmerizing film examining literature, story and communal tall tales set in the world of the intellectual. Framed against a backdrop of academia, opera and stimulating if not self important conversation. The film which has no real linear story is shot in a way that suggests high drama or thriller making a very interesting watch for the viewer. Editing and cinematography are both quite breath taking.
_"The passing of time modifies my capacity to evoke and introduces a new system of memory selection. Bit by bit those memories I could share with others become blurred and those I cannot share force themselves on me. They are vivid and persistent memories, but not verifyable by anyone else. There are no witnesses.... All submerge in the slowness and silence of distant memory."_
