Cria Cuervos

Raise Ravens

Shot while military dictator General Franco was on his deathbed, CRIA CUERVOS heralded a turning point in Spain. Carlos Saura's exquisite film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family (the title derives from the Spanish proverb: "Raise ravens and they'll peck out your eyes").

Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin). Seamlessly shifting between fantasy and reality, the film subtly evokes both the complex feelings of childhood and the struggles of a nation emerging from the shadows.

Nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes. Winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury and nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Nominated for Best Foriegn Film at the Cesar Awards.

"CRIA CUERVOS unfolds like a kind of morbid reverie, reverberating with strange frissons about what one generation passes to the next, and how even rebellion is a kind of heirloom." - Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph

"The film is a masterpiece of form and technique, and Chaplin and Torrent are both outstanding." - Peter Bradshaw, Guardian