Directing
A multi-part feature on the governing body of Spain, the Popular Party under Jose María Aznar. Themes include the bombing of Iraq, immigration, U.S. fire in Baghdad, and the manipulation of the media.
In 1939, in a French prison camp, José Garcés of the defeated Spanish Republican army raises the spirits of his fellow prisoners by telling the story of the year he was 8 years old, 1911, in a small town in northeastern Spain. He was a rascal, baffling his father, always in trouble, and in love with Valentina, a neighbor girl. On his roof top at night he sends semaphore messages to her. He writes poems. He gets them into trouble, killing her father's breeding pigeons. When the two families camp at a decaying castle, his tutor, a sympathetic priest, tells him about the most valiant men, the saints, the heroes, and the poets. Already a poet, he learns a lesson about being a hero.
A woman arrives in town to work as a teacher. It is the time of the 'maquis', the anti-Franco guerrilla that fights with little hope in some regions of Spain just after the end of the civil war. She has a love affair with one of the guerrillas, but their relationship will have an impossible future because of the past.
In 1939, José Garcés is in French prison camp after the defeat of Spain's Republicans. To entertain and inspire his fellow prisoners, he tells the story of becoming a man in 1919, the year he realized that learning to live is the same as learning to die. His stiff and demanding father loses a fortune in German war bonds, takes a job in Caspe, and leaves José on his own in Zaragoza to finish high school while apprenticing in a pharmacy. José courts his beloved Valentina via letters, becomes intimate with Isabel, a maid he meets in a cinema who shares his ideas of free love, and comes under the influence of El Checa, an anarchist and gentle teacher who leads a doomed revolt.
A tempestuous love triangle forms between beautiful local girl Mararía, an English volcanologist and a Basque doctor in the island of Lanzarote in the 1930s.
A group of friends finds a dilapidated place and decide to repair it, paint it and live in it in communal plan. The problem is the bank, owner of the premises, does not want them occupied so they threaten to call the police to evict them.
Following the Spanish Civil War, a man goes into hiding to avoid arrest by the victorious Nationalist forces.
In the Easter holidays of 1967, three friends come to Torremolinos willing to flirt and experience strong emotions. Contact with a new environment, in which while some find the lies that hide behind the luxury and splendor and dangers that accompany life easier, others find true love.
