Jose Luis Cuerda

Born in Albacete on February 18, 1947, José Luis Cuerda Martínez remembers that his first rural years were hard. “My paternal grandfather was a merchant and my maternal grandfather was a horse dealer. We lived life on the street and it was a faunal existence. We were bugs ”, he explained. In a game of poker, his father won a wonderful apartment in the heart of Madrid and the family moved to the capital.

Few know that he was going to become a priest, but after three years he left the seminary to study Law, an occupation that did not convince him either. He ended up becoming a radio broadcasting technician, to collaborate in news programs and later direct cultural programs on TVE.

The public entity financed two telefilms for him, which represented his first works as a director, El túnel , a correct adaptation of the famous novel by Ernesto Sábato , and Mala racha , with Sancho Gracia as a boxer. After leaving home, he began his career as a filmmaker with Pares y Nones , “A healthy miserable comedy”, according to his own words, with Antonio Resines –an omnipresent actor in the films of the time–. In the opinion of the critics, he belonged to the Madrid comedy genre, along with the works of Fernando Trueba and Fernando Colomo ., but he was not convinced by this classification. “I never felt very Madrid,” he declared.

It stands out with El bosque animado , a risky adaptation of the novel by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez , complex to bring to the screen, as it would require animation to bring the animals to life. But he focuses on the intertwined adventures of the human inhabitants of the Cecebre forge, under the protection of the forest, with a tragicomic tone. He is right in the cast, as he shows his brilliance above all Alfredo Landa , brilliant as the peasant Xan de Malvís, a farmer who, fed up with starving, throws himself into the mountains to become the bandit Fendetestas, but Fernando Rey , Miguel Rellán also embroider his roles and others.

It maintains the choral character in Dawn, which is not little, but raises the surreal tone, although José Luis Cuerda prefers to speak of “surruralism”, referring to the rural environment in which the action takes place, in the Sierra de Albacete. It begins with the arrival of an engineer (Resines again) who works in Oklahoma, but who returns to Spain to enjoy a sabbatical year with his father, in a remote mountain town, but in reality, this start only serves to give foot to numerous absurd gags. At the time it was a resounding failure, both with critics and with the public, but over the years it has become a cult film, with phenomena such as the Dawn Gatherings, which bring together fans in the towns where the film was filmed, to remember phrases from the tape, such as “mayor, we are all contingent, but you are necessary”.

In a survey carried out in 2013 by Seminci, critics chose El verdugo , by Luis García Berlanga , as the best Spanish film of the last six decades . But the public on foot opted for Dawn, which is not little . A few years later, he made a film along the same lines, Así en el cielo como en la Tierra , which was completely unsuccessful.

The widow of Captain Estrada , about a widow ( Anna Galiena ) who during the Franco regime has a passionate romance with a friend of her deceased husband, La sorna , a rural comedy set in the 15th century, which recovers Landa, is not very interesting either. and Resines, or the chaotic comedy with social concerns Touching bottom , about a young man who goes to work for his uncle (Resines, who else?).

He invited the young Alejandro Amenábar to shoot the latter , because he had been dazzled by his shorts Himenóptero and Luna , and by its screenwriter, Mateo Gil . They say that on one occasion when he had to be absent from filming, Amenábar had occupied his chair. “This is my chair, it will be yours one day,” he told the boy, who many years later would tell him about the script for Thesis , with which he indeed wanted to finally be a director. José Luis Cuerda decided that he was very interested, so he made his debut as a producer with the film, which became a phenomenon. He reprized in Abre los ojos .

The man from Albacete also directed the television series Makinavaja , an adaptation of the adventures of the character in the cartoons, which will not be remembered either. He doesn’t quite find the tone, because he wants to give it an air of a story without succeeding, but he achieves more interest with The Education of Fairies , with a toymaker in love with a widow. Despite its somewhat depressing ending, perhaps his best work is La lengua de las mariposas , an adaptation of stories by Manuel Rivas , which develops the relationship between a republican professor in the years before the Civil War and one of his little students . He returned to the Rivas universe with Everything is Silence, about young smugglers, but it does not reach the same level.

After several years trying to carry out the project, he shoots Tiempo después , which forms a trilogy with the aforementioned Amanece, which is not little , and Así en el cielo como en la Tierra . But the spark has deserted him, so he produces few laughs. Active still having reached 70, he sums up the Seventh Art with a stupendous phrase: “Cinema is essentially a beam of light in the dark.”