SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain – Paco Rabal worked with Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni and Carlos Saura, made more than 200 films and built a career spanning Spain, France, Italy and Mexico. In “200 Lives, Paco Rabal,” the Spanish screen legend gets one more role: Narrator of his own life.
Directed by Vanesa Benítez, the documentary world premieres as the closing film of San Sebastián Festival’s Made in Spain section. Latido Films handles international sales on the Spain-France-Mexico co-production, produced by Spain’s MLK Producciones and Horizon Media with France’s Plan B et Compagnie and Mexico’s Monstro Films.
Its key discovery is a collection of cassette recordings Rabal recorded his memoirs on. Combined with his Super 8 films, photographs, videotapes and other family material, they allow the actor, who died in 2001, to drive the film himself.
“Paco Rabal was and remains one of Spain’s and Europe’s top leading actors,” says Latido Films managing director Antonio Saura. “His versatility gave him innumerable recognitions, including a Cannes best actor award.”
But it is the personal material, Saura argues, that provides the sales proposition with another dimension.
“Here we find his life was as exciting as his talent, and listening to him narrate it, thanks to the amazing discovery of some self-recorded tapes, brings us a new perspective of his art and his life.”
For Benítez, the challenge was to peer behind Francisco Rabal, the internationally celebrated actor, and find Paco, the boy from rural Murcia.
“I think Paco was always himself, whether he was in front of a camera playing a role under the most famous director of the time or talking about his personal experiences in front of a tape recorder,” she told Variety.
“When you listen to the cassettes on which he recorded his memoirs, you can picture him sitting at a bar, surrounded by his fellow townspeople.”
Benítez avoids a conventional talking head biography. Other testimonies remain in voiceover, while Rabal’s recordings and archive drive a film structured partly as a last dream, with the actor looking back on his life at the moment of death.
Hours spent watching his home movies, reading his diaries and listening to the tapes revealed dreams as a returning fascination.
“He dreams of his loved ones who are no longer with him, of things that later happened to him in real life. He even found himself on trial in his dreams,” she said. “I believe that in dreams, despite being surrounded by so much fantasy, there is a great deal of truth.”
They also show someone looking backwards.
“Deep down, the one speaking was a child who wanted to return to the paradise of childhood,” Benítez explained.
Rabal repeatedly returned to Cuesta de Gos in Murcia, where he had grown up, filming family scenes on Super 8. He died in Bordeaux while returning to Spain, having recently played Francisco Goya in Carlos Saura’s “Goya in Bordeaux,” a film which won him the Goya for best actor.
“That is why, through cinema and, in a sense, a final dream, this film brings Paco back home,” Benítez said.
Yet the doc-feature also uses him as a route through European and Latin American cinema.
“Rabal’s journey offers the chance to look into all the film revolutions: from Mexico New Cinema to French Nouvelle Vague or Spain’s ’80s,” said producer José Antonio Hergueta.
That international history even feeds the project’s co-production structure.
“Fortunately Rabal is still remembered in France and Mexico, at least amongst mature generations and filmgoers,” Hergueta said. “We’ve focused on partners that would appreciate a quality documentary that, thanks to cinema, travels through the 20th century.”
France was particularly attractive, he added, because of its established broadcast space for documentaries about cinema, actors and filmmakers.
Rabal’s career had many politically divided lives. A star of Franco-era Spanish cinema, he would become associated with filmmakers and political currents distant from that world.
“Paco was a person full of contradictions, and that’s also reflected in the documentary: his desires, his fears, his thoughts — so diverse and contradictory,” she said.
What remained constant, Benítez argues, was his understanding of acting as work. “He never forgot his humble, working-class family background, despite all the egos, glitz and pretensions that are always swirling around the world of cinema.”
Much of the material that makes that private side visible survived thanks to his wife, actor Asunción Balaguer, who spent decades preserving and organizing his archive.
“It’s really the History of Cinema of the 20th Century — yes, with a capital ‘H’ and ‘C’ — as seen through his work,” Benítez said. “The value of all this is incalculable.”
For Hergueta, the film also illustrates a broader challenge facing Spanish documentary: international co-production has advanced faster than the ability of many culturally specific films to reach audiences abroad.
Spain has no shortage of “subject matters, stories and characters,” he argues. The work begins much earlier, in developing projects with international potential “from the very conception of the idea.”
With Rabal, at least, that international dimension comes ready made with its subject.
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