ARDE! + LA NOVIA ENSANGRENTADA
ARDE!
Paco Campano | Spain | 2022 | 72 min. | V.O. Spanish
Paco Campano, our Sevillian B-movie master, joins forces with Gonzalo García Pelayo in his quixotic 10+1 project (producing ten films in one year) with Arde!, starring an explosive woman born of the sperm swept away by the Iguazú waterfalls, the offspring of Argentinean camp icons of the 60s and 70s, actress Isabel Sarli and director Armando Bo. Lacking identity and memory (and for most of the film, also without clothes), she will set this hellish world ablaze with her limitless desire. Following its screening in Sitges, this is a film where "B series and Exploitation shake hands with the cinema of Lynch and Lucrecia Martel: sex, UFOs, VHS, and parallel lives".
LA NOVIA ENSANGRENTADA
Vicente Aranda | Spain | 1972 | 100 min.
O.V. in Spanish
Paco Campano introduces a work in intergenerational dialogue with Arde!, the bloody inspiration behind his film revealing Vicente Aranda somewhere between his beginnings in Barcelona's avant-garde Gauche Divine and his authorial consecration with Cambio de sexo, venturing into genre cinema with this vampire film, a free adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's novel, Carmilla, taken to the 70s. The result is a relatively hidden gem, once slaughtered by censors for its sex scenes (the full-length version could only be seen abroad) and some lurid conversations. A newlywed couple stay at the husband's (Simón Andreu) family mansion. Susan, the young bride (Maribel Martín), tormented by the consummation of the marriage, discovers and becomes obsessed with an ancestor of her husband's who, after their wedding night, murders her newly wedded husband with a dagger.