With the multiple Goya Award-winning film Living is Easy With Eyes Closed opening the 2014 festival and X-Men: First Class star Alex Gonzalez as its guest, this year’s Spanish Film Festival is set to deliver the cream of the Spanish-speaking and Latin American film crop.
The 17th annual film festival will close with Witching and Bitching, but it is the six- Goya Award winning Living is Easy With Eyes Closed that is the major draw card. Named after The Beatles classic Strawberry Fields Forever (which John Lennon penned in Spain), the David Trueba (Soldiers of Salamina) written and directed film won best film, director and actor at the Goyas and tells the tale of a school teacher (Javier Cámara), who uses Beatles lyrics to teach his students English and decides to meet his hero John Lennon when the Beatle visits Spain to shoot a film there.
Living is Easy With Eyes Closed is one of 30 films screening at the festival, which runs in Melbourne from April 30 to May 18, and also screens at six other cities across the country from April 29 to May 21. Gonzalez, who is in two of the films showing at the festival, Scorpion in Love and Combustion, is one of Spain’s rising stars and he will attend Q+A screenings for Scorpion in Love, which he stars alongside Javier Bardem.
Other films of note include Spain’s biggest local box office hit of 2013 Three Many Weddings, Ariel Winograd’s (My First Wedding) To Fool a Thief, the 11-Goya Awardnominated Family United and the debut film from Spanish-born director Diego Quemada- Díez, The Golden Cage, a powerful drama about two Guatemalan teens who attempt the 1200-mile border crossing to the USA.
