AND DAY BREAKS... INTO A GALLOP   1988
(Amanece, que no es poco)
Directed by José Luis Cuerda 110 minutes In Spanish with home-made English subtitles by Cc Teodoro, an engineer who teaches at the University of Oklahoma, returns to his homeland of Spain with his father Jimmy on a motorcycle for a summer road trip. Their journey takes them to a strange village full of utterly shocking phenomena. The villagers are used to astounding miracles occurring as common everyday events. Peasants are well-versed in Faulkner and Dostoevsky, and the drunks of this small remote village seem to live in a parallel world based on different laws. Grade-school classroom biology lessons are taught in the form of gospel choir. The local church is more dada than it is clerical.
 This delirious world, seemingly suspended in both time and space and cut off from the rest of civilization, was conjured up by director José Luis Cuerda. Earlier Spanish cinema that was critical of society had been based on drama and satire, but this film is fueled by an absurd madness. With a demented script that went completely against the cosmopolitan spirit of the 1980s, he somehow managed to recruit a huge all-stars cast and keep his shit together during long weeks of summer in a tiny mountain village. But it paid off: Amanece quickly went on to become a cult classic, and it remains a beloved piece of Spanish weirdness to these days.

Despite all of its bizarre supernatural aspects, and all of the fantastic twists and turns, there is an essential fusion of life, death, religion, sex and magic in this bizarre village. When the movie comes to an end, you never want to leave this unpredictable twilight zone which makes our modern world look utterly boring. Much of what makes this such a wild village is that it takes our ideas of democracy so seriously, that the whole thing becomes almost surreal. This might explain why it is a beloved movie by the recent M15 anti-austerity movement in Spain.

This will be an extremely rare high-definition screening.