Staff Review/ Con la pata quebrada

Cornerhouse Digital Reporter Owain Thomas reviews Con la pata quebrada

When I moved back to the UK from Spain three years ago, there were two things in Manchester that made the cultural/lifestyle transition more bearable. The weather, which I checked daily via webcam prior to the move, was not one of them. The Instituto Cervantes language school and the ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival, however, were. They were my salvation.

I knew they wouldn’t cure the daily vitamin D deficiency in a hurry, but lessons at one and subtitled viewings at the other gave me the rare opportunity to close my eyes occasionally and feel like I was there. Or Argentina. Or Mexico. Or Peru for that matter. The two became the perfect filler for the Hispanic-shaped hole in my life.

So as ¡Viva! enters its 20th year this month (and once again in fitting partnership with the mighty Instituto Cervantes) I’m excited to immerse myself in the cream of Spanish-language cinema again and I’m delighted to have been given a sneak peek of one of the highlights of this year’s programme, Con la pata quebrada (Barefoot in the Kitchen).

Directed by El Pais film critic Diego Galán and narrated by Spanish TV stalwart Carlos Hipólito, Barefoot in the Kitchen is an entertaining and thought-provoking documentary charting the changing representation of women in Spanish cinema from the 1930s to the present day.

Bringing together clips from over 180 iconic Spanish films, Galán paints an occasionally amusing but ultimately incensing picture of women at the mercy of a manipulative and oppressive regime; one that sought to condition and control under the guise of National-Catholicism.

The years immediately after the end of the civil war in 1939 are shown as particularly oppressive. Film clips overlaid and interspersed with print propaganda and speeches highlighting how hard the patriarchal powerbase, led by ultra conservative dictator General Franco, worked to reinforce the image of subservience, obedience and catholic virtue.

Through Barefoot in Kitchen, Galán tells a story of how popular cinema was essentially commandeered during the Franco-era as a platform for social control. He then reveals the fallacy, somewhat humorously, of women’s ‘liberation’ on film after Franco’s death in the late seventies. A time when women weren’t so much liberated from their confinement to the kitchen, as liberated from their clothes and dignity as sexpots and sirens.

To say that Spanish filmmakers were alone in producing this sort of titillating carry on is a fallacy in its own right. You just wonder in this context whether the uninhibited years that Galán documents did their own kind of damage to the Spanish woman’s journey towards equality, either in society or on celluloid.

On the whole Galán has chosen his imagery and narrative brilliantly to tell an almost incredible history of women on film. One, which I feel, could only ever have been made with Spanish women at its heart.

Con la pata quebrada screens as part of ¡Viva! on Tue 18 Mar. Book your tickets here.