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Despite the fact that the Spanish colonial cinema, as a matter of course, fails to appear in relevant specialised studies on an international scale and has not even received the attention it certainly deserves from the nation's own historians and scholars, an initial recognition is in order and that is to say that Spain has a far from negligible colonial film heritage. Although, logically, many of these films can at the same time be attributed to other specific genres and subgenres (melodramas, thrillers, adventure films...), several dozen titles -varying considerably in nature and quality - do in fact recount the Spanish presence in Cuba, the Philippines and the African enclaves, producing a sweeping colonial fresco which, however, has received much less attention than that accorded by the British, French, Italian, German or even the Belgian cinemas to their respective possessions. An indepth review of the Spanish colonial cinema - a task clearly beyond the scope of this paper, which is an advance of a more extensive study currently in progress - will assuredly provide a few surprises and very probably reveal an identity of its own with respect to the contemporary contributions of other European powers.
As the invention of the cinematograph practically coincided in time with the loss of the Spanish possessions in America and the Pacific, it is to be expected that Spain's colonial cinema would have necessarily been characterised by an unequivocal African slant. In effect, although Los Últimos de Filipinas (Antonio Román, 1945) ranks among the most outstanding titles of the genre, the films devoted to the Spanish presence in the Pacific are very few in number. Noche sin cielo (Ignacio F. Iquino, 1947) and Aquellas palabras (Luis Arroyo, 1948) are clearly in debt to the interest in the region awakened by that noteworthy and successful film by Román, although neither was able to even remotely match its historical fortune. Aquellas palabras, together with Misión blanca (Juan de Orduña, 1946), filmed two years earlier and centred on Guinea, nonetheless initiated an emblematic subgenre of the Spanish colonial cinema in the period of the Franco regime, featuring the missionaries sent to the colonies, which was practically without a parallel in the history of other European cinemas. The possibilities of this subgenre...