MOVIES AND BOOKS

...about the Camino(s), Galicia, Spain...

Movies with Galician background

"Mar adentro" by Alejandro Amenábar (2004) with starring Javier Bardem.Intimate a movie setting, intense in philosophic dialogues about life and death. A Galician young man becomes tetraplejic after an accident. After years of reflection he arrives to the conclusion that only death is the most desired redemption for him.

"Lunes al sol" by Fernando León de Aranoa (2002) starring Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar.In the eighties the Spanish urban working class suffers from structural adjustment programmes. Thousands employees of the shipmaking industry in Vigo (industrial Galician port) are made redundant. A hopeless situation full of worries and distress forces them to live only in the present. And yet there are moments of respite, spending the "mondays in the sun" (los lunes al sol).

"El bosque animado" by José Luis Cuerda (1987) based on the novel bearing the same name by the Galician author Wenceslao Fernández Flórez
Peculiar characters emerge behind the trees of a forest: a bandit, a water deviner, a girl who works, a boy who doesn't want to work, a young girl who'd like to emigrate, a ghost that needs company...These and many other characters interwave a colourful carpet of stories. The resulting texture combines both the secret life of humans and plants...


Movies related to the camino

"Vía Láctea" by Luis Buñuel (1969).
Two pilgrims decide to walk the camino from France to Santiago de Compostela. They discuss heretics. Despite the irreverent topic, many catholics claim the importance of this movie. It's the history of heretic movements within christianity since Roman times.

"Pilgrims" by Coline Serreau (2005)
French comedy about the Camino. According to their mothers last will her two sons and one daughter may only receive their respective heritage, if they accomplish the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela together. Are they going to endure this hardship considering they haven't been talking to each other for years?


Books of galician writers

Manuel Rivas
"¿Que me quieres, amor?" - Short stories about Galician society from the post-war period until the present day. It includes "La lengua de las mariposas", the plot of which inspired Armendáriz to make a film, both moving and dramatic, about the civil war.

Camilo Jose Cela, nobel prize winner.
"La colmena" (The Beehive)- Caleidoscopic novel about Spanish society in the post-war period.

Ramón del Valle Inclán, novelist and playwright.
"Luces de bohemia" (Bohemian Lights)- tragicomical theatre vision of Spanish society of the XIX century.

Rosalía de Castro - galician female poet par excellance.