A thrill to see this newly restored classic, which permits one to fully appreciate José Luis Alcaine’s gorgeous cinematography. Director Montxo Armendáriz moves slowly into close-ups in a way that makes you feel you’re seeing into the very souls of the characters. Very beautiful and moving. Most Spaniards of a certain generation will recognise the way of life and the structures of feeling depicted here. Part of the Cinema Libero strand. The image above is its 25th anniversary release. The gorgeous 4K restoration is for its fortieth. It’s a film that continues to live. There’s something sadly still rare — and because of that impossibly moving to me–  about poor people being depicted with so much dignity, beauty, intelligence and humour. That Tasio and the people of his village also represent a whole generation of rural Spaniards makes it even more potent.

I was privileged to be at the Bologna screening when Montxo Armendárix introduced the film and include what I caught of the introduction below. I missed some bits but will include the gist in italics in the English translation below the film:

Montxo Armendáriaz: ‘A thousand thanks to all for your help with the projection. That’s the only thing I’ll say in Italian. I’ll try to speak slowly in Castilian so I may be understood and translated. Apologies for the voice, which between my asthma and the temperature in Bologna is a bit destroyed. I first of all give thanks to the festival for selecting our film in this magnificent strand and also for the Filmoteca for undertaking the restoration on the film’s 40th anniversary. The film you are about to see is based on a real person . Tasio was a person who lived in a tiny village in Navarra. He was a simple, honest,  and generous man who all his live lived from making carbon from vegetation in the hills and also from furtively hunting and fishing. Tasio was very proud and said his family had never done without food or any of the essentials and that he had always refused to work for others.   He lived by two principles. The first was that if you only took what you needed from nature and left everything else as is, nature would always give you back what you needed to live. The other principle, Tasio was a very peaceful man,  and he believed that though there were a bunch of people with whom he disagreed about their ideas or their way of life, he totally respected them; including, as you will see in the film,  he respected the views and the lifestyles of the forest guards who are the ones who persecuted and fined him for furtively hunting and fishing. I first knew him forty years ago, and the truth is that I was much younger and much more innocent then and thought that these two principles — respect for nature and respect for others — so normal, plain,  and simple could or would be the base on which could be sustained our development and progress towards the future.  Sadly, forty years later, we can now attest that the environment is completely destroyed because of all we’ve done to nature, our cohabitation is sadly increasingly violent and we are left with  confrontations, wars and genocides. There were a couple more sentences which ended with happy viewing but which I sadly missed.

Tasio a film I will return to and more carefully consider in further posts.

José Arroyo