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Gerard Dapena
Nineteen ninety-nine may well be considered the year of the Mother in Spanish cinema. In May, Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother/Todo sobre mi madre garnered enthusiastic press notices at the Cannes Film Festival and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, among other important prizes. Almodóvar has long been the most salient example of the increasing global presence of Spanish cinema, yet he is not the only Spanish filmmaker who has benefited from the visibility afforded by prestigious festival awards.
Benito Zambrano's Solas/Women Alone, a modest first feature also dealing with motherhood, avoided distribution limbo in Spain by virtue of its foreign exposure. International acclaim first arrived at the Berlin Film Festival, where Solas received the Audience Award. This successful reception abroad ensured the film a prompt opening in March in stark contrast to the initial indifference of distributors and exhibitors. In spite of a bare-bone publicity campaign, glowing reviews and excellent word of mouth turned Solas into the surprise hit of 1999.1
The trajectory of Solas discloses the dynamics currently shaping Spain's film industry. The commercial viability of its production is tied today more closely than ever to the transnational forces redefining mass media and entertainment in our global economy. In the face of Hollywood's dominance of their own market, a number of Spanish filmmakers have opted for creating pictures imbued with a national specificity as a means to draw spectators at home as well as abroad. Directors like Almodóvar and Saura, among others, have attempted to cash in on age-old signs of Spanish cultural identity, oftentimes invested with a parodic or self-critical twist, as a strategy to market their work on the international scene.2Other Spanish filmmakers have either refigured or reinscribed past notions of Spanishness to reflect the changes in Spanish society, or jettisoned them altogether for the pursuit of a European or transcontinental identity.3
Solas, by contrast, proposes a turn towards the self and the local that eschews both stereotypical signs of identity and eulogies to Spain's new global image. Zambrano has acknowledged that Solas was a film that nobody wanted to finance or release, a fate that typically befalls over a third of Spanish films in any...