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El año del descubrimiento (The Year of the Discovery). 2020. Spain/Switzerland. Directed by Luis López Carrasco. In Spanish; English subtitles. 200 min.
“Those famous Spanish tomatoes, I’ve never tasted one.” So says one of the dozen Murcia residents interviewed at a local café in the southern region’s capital city by Spanish documentarian Luis López Carrasco. The patrons are reflecting on the year 1992, which saw the country host the World’s Fair and Olympic Games in a sanguine statement on post-Franco Spain in the years after its entry into the European Union (which is where those tomatoes went). López Carrasco stitches together a powerful alterative history that gives voice to industrial and social crises culminating in a workers’ rebellion that would burn down Murcia’s regional parliament the very same year. Shot on Hi8 video, The Year of the Discovery exploits its ambiguous temporality to link past and present through the very human face of shifting economic tides. Clocking in at 200 minutes, the film is one of the year’s most impressive takes on non-fiction, with an unusual use of split-screen that doubles down on what’s at stake: the messy stuff of civic life. Courtesy of Begin Again Films
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