Furtivos, now considered to be José Luis Borau's masterpiece, premiered at the Amaya cinema in Madrid on 8 September 1975, after a series of vicissitudes that have not prevented it from becoming a classic of Spanish cinema. Now, 50 years later, the Malaga and San Sebastián film festivals and Filmoteca Vasca (Basque Film Archive) are joining forces to pay tribute to it on its anniversary. Furtivos will be the Golden Film at the 28th Malaga Film Festival, which will take place from 14 to 23 March, and will open the KlasikoaK section of the next edition of the San Sebastián Film Festival. It will be screened with a copy restored by Video Mercury Films and FlixOlé, in a tribute that will be completed with a book published by the Malaga Film Festival, Filmoteca Española (Spanish Film Archive) and DAMA, in collaboration with Caimán Cuadernos de Cine and the San Sebastián Film Festival.
Directed and written by José Luis Borau, in collaboration with Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Furtivos stars Ovidi Montllor, Lola Gaos and Alicia Sánchez. It tells Ángel’s story, a poacher who lives in a forest with his mother Martina, a despotic and violent woman. On one of his rare trips to the city, he meets Milagros, a young runaway from a reform school and the lover of a notorious criminal. Ángel protects her and takes her home. The mother's animosity towards Milagros, as well as the attraction that Ángel feels towards her, together with the claustrophobic aspect of the relationships between the characters, lead to a drama.
The screening of Furtivos was so conditioned by the Francoist authorities that it was rejected for the Cannes and Berlin festivals. It was better received at San Sebastián, the starting point of its resounding success with critics and audiences, where it received the Golden Shell for Best Film and the Perla del Cantábrico Award for Best Spanish-language Feature Film. It also won recognition at the Spanish Cinema Writers Circle Awards, the Fotogramas de Plata Awards and the Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival.
This new 4K copy of the film, which will be screened in Malaga and San Sebastián, has been made by the distributor Video Mercury Films in collaboration with the FlixOlé platform. For the restoration process, they used the original 35mm negative and the filmmaker and co-screenwriter of the film, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, has supervised the process.
The book Furtivos. 50 años, by Carlos F. Heredero, returns to the film to reliably document the inner history of such a singular project for the first time: the chronology, the figures, the roles, the writing of the script, the production plan, the money, the contracts, the locations, the incidents of the shooting, the censorship records, the conversations with festivals, the distribution, the box office, its international circulation, the controversies and threats, etc.
This in-depth study offers new perspectives to frame the film in its social, political and cultural context, between the criminal agony of Franco's dictatorship and the struggles that prepare the Transition to democracy.
At the same time, the analysis of its images —inherited from Buñuel and Goya, from Gutiérrez Solana’s fierce Castile and Cela’s dark realism— allows us to understand the complex nature of his discourse and forms. A previously unpublished interview with Borau about the film completes this research.
