L'Espoir / Sierra de Teruel

As Denis Marion, the assistant of André Malraux, remembered in "L'Ecran français" on July 4, 1945: "In early 1938, Malraux conceived the project of making a film about the Spanish civil war. The film was not to be - nor was it - the adaptation of his book. It is evident that the same experiences inspired both the one and the other. One episode they have in common: the airplane attack on one of Franco's clandestine airfields. But the screenplay was written with the expressive potential of cinema in mind and contains numerous original sequences. Although he had never worked in cinema before, André Malraux came up with the subject alone and wrote the dialogs, which were translated into Spanish by Max Aub. Boris Peskine carried out the technical decoupage. Filming began in Barcelona in June, 1938, in one of the city's three studios. (…) The technical difficulties were those of a country at war, as can be imagined." Filming was interrupted in January 1939 when Franco's troops entered Barcelona and Malraux had to do without a few of his episodes. The film's harsh, essential style alternates fiction and reality, and in many aspects it is a forerunner of Rossellini's Neorealism and the nouvelle vague, and it was enthusiastically received as such by France's young critics. Edited with the available means, L'Espoir should have been released in Paris in August, but the worsening situation and the outbreak of the war postponed its release. The film was only released in 1945, at the end of the war; luckily the negative hadn't been damaged. (Gianni Rondolino)

Regia, soggetto, sceneggiatura/Director, story, screenplay: André Malraux
Assistente alla regia/Assisten director: Denis Marion
Fotografia/Director of photography: Louis Page, André Thomas
Scenografia/Set design: Vincent Petit
Montaggio/Film editor: Georges Grace
Musica/Music: Darius Milhaud
Interpreti e personaggi/Cast and characters: Sempere (Comandante Pena), Andrés Mejuto (Muñoz), Julio Peña (Attigniès), Pedro Codina (Schreiner), José Lado (José), Nicolás Rodríguez (Mercery), S. Ferro (Saldi).
Produzione/Production: Colonnello Edouard Corniglion-Molinier, 1939