30° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL
FESTA MOBILE/CLASSICS

VIVA LA MUERTE

LONG LIVE DEATH
by Fernando Arrabal
Country: France
Year: 1971
Duration: 90'


Fando is twelve years old. He lives in a Spanish town with his mother and his aunt; he misses his father, a republican agent who was arrested and sentenced to death first, then jailed for life. Fando knows the man has gone insane, that he might have escaped and disappeared into thin air; he imagines however in his fantasies that it was his mother, a stifling and bigoted woman, who reported her husband to Franco’s fascists. Then one day Fando meets a friend who tells him his father is still alive. The opening credits signed by Topor begin the movie, which transforms into a delirious autobiographic revisitation of Franco’s Spain, and which launched Arrabal in the international scene.

Biography

film director

Fernando Arrabal

Fernando Arrabal (Metilla, Spain, 1932) is a Spanish novelist, playwright, poet, film director, and painter. He is one of his country’s most important artists. From the 1950s he actively worked in Paris; there he became friends with Beckett, he worked with Topor, Jodorowsky, André Breton. After being arrested in 1967, he became an “undesirable” in his homeland until 1977. Ten years later King Juan Carlos awarded him the Fine Arts Gold Medal and granted him free access to his country. After directing his first movie Long Live Death (1971), he made I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (1973), which was heavily censored; The Tree of Guernica (1975), filmed in Italy; and Farewell, Babylon!, which he made in 1993 after a long pause. He wrote many the novels, notably La Vierge Rouge (1986) and Le funambole de Dieu (1998). From the 1990s on he dedicated himself to poetry and painting.

FILMOGRAFIA

Viva la muerte (1970), J’irai comme un cheval fou (Andrò come un cavallo pazzo, 1973), L’arbre de Guernica (L’albero di Guernica, 1975), The Emperor of Peru (1982), Le cimetière des voitures (cm, tv, 1983), Adieu, Babylone! (1993).

Declaration

film director

“Alfonso Sastre has recently sent me a beautiful poem (entitled Ballada de Carabanchel) from jail. The poem emblematically describes the tragic event he is forced to live throught. […] It reminded me of an old debate on the possibility of developing culture during a fascist regime. Even at the time Sastre was right, a poet has only two paths: imprisonment or exile.”

Cast

& Credits

regia/director Fernando Arrabal
soggetto/story Fernando Arrabal, dal suo romanzo/from his novel Baal Babylone sceneggiatura/screenplay Fernando Arrabal, Plaudine Lagrive fotografia/cinematography Jean-Marc Ripert
montaggio/film editing Laurence Leininger
musica/music Jean-Yves Bosseur
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters Mahdi Chaouch (Fando), Núria Espert (la madre/mother), Anouk Ferjac (la zia/auntie), Ivan Henriques (il padre/father), Jazia Klibi (Thérèse), Suzanne Comte (la nonna/grandmother), Jean-Louis Chassigneux (il nonno/grandfather), Mohamed Bellasoued (il colonnello/colonel), Víctor García (Fando a vent’anni/at twenty)
produzione/production Isabelle Films, S.A.T.P.E.C.
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