Spanish Noir

Like every year, the festival’s programmers Jana Bébarová and Milan Hain have included a section dedicated to the non-American film noir genre. After last year’s excursion to Bollywood, this year they are returning to Europe again and will present the forms of noir in Spanish filmography in five selected films. Alongside the famous Death of a Cyclist (Muerte de un ciclista, 1955), directed by Juan Antonio Bardem, about a loving couple brought to ruin by a tragic accident, lesser-known films such as Ditirambo (1969) will be screened in the Czech Republic, in which the film’s director Gonzalo Suárez plays the title protagonist, a journalist who is hired by a wealthy widow to exact revenge on her late husband’s former lover.

The character of a disgraced, unsuccessful writer who gets caught in the net of his own invention appears in José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Red Fish (Los peces rojos, 1955), while Express Train from Andalucía (El expreso de Andalucía, 1956), directed by Francisco Rovira Beleta, is a prime example of a thrilling heist film. The selection will be rounded off by The Glass Eye (El ojo de cristal, 1956), which Antonio Santillán directed as an adaptation of a novel by the American hard-boiled literature writer Cornel Woolrich, whose work the Noir Film Festival presented in the selection section back in 2019.