The Queen of Spain

The beautiful Spanish actress Macarena Granada became a celebrated film star in Hollywood in the 1950s. Now she returns to her homeland, which she has not set foot in since fleeing during the Spanish Civil War, to play Queen Isabella I of Castile in an American blockbuster film. During filming, she encounters former companions and soon they are working together to rescue one of her closest friends: a Spanish film director who spent years in the Mauthausen concentration camp and is now being deported to a labour camp by the Spanish regime. But Macarena's biggest challenge is yet to come: meeting Franco, whom she despises and who wants to inspect the filming. "Oscar-winner Fernando Trueba has directed a sometimes wistful, sometimes desperately bitter tragicomedy that makes subtle use of cinema conventions to reveal illusions, desires and dependencies. Forms of subtle satire, solid slapstick and hints of a sometimes crude comedy flow seamlessly into one another. The result is an allusive, thoroughly profound "kaleidoscope of Spanish moments". "The Queen of Spain" is a kind of sequel: in his film "The Girl of Your Dreams" (1998) - also starring Penelope Cruz - Fernando Trueba took a satirically sharp look at the fatal (dependent) relationship between the film world and political terror. Even though much has changed historically in the meantime, many things have remained the same in Spain: The country is stuck in the deepest dictatorship under Francisco Franco after 1945. "Some of the characters could have sprung from an early Almodóvar film. Trueba wants (...) to entertain, and he succeeds well. And yet there is always a political element, which sometimes comes through between the lines, sometimes quite directly. It's about art during the dictatorship, about the role it can play in political life, but doesn't have to. Every action can also be a political act, every gesture must sometimes be justified, a position must always be taken. The film makes us aware of this: that the political is also in the small things - and of course also in big heroic actions. The film is about victims, followers and opponents of the regime who more or less try to get by in society and either accept what they find and make the best of it or not." (Verena Schmöller, on: kino-zeit.de)