SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain – Madrid-based Latido Films has picked up international sales rights to Isaki Lacuesta’s “Flamenco Sketches” (“Jaleos”), the latest film from Isaki Lacuesta, one of Spain’s most singular filmmakers, which plays this week at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Lacuesta has twice won San Sebastian’s top prize, the Golden Shell, with “The Double Steps” and “Between Two Waters.”
“Flamenco Sketches” will close San Sebastian’s Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section. Using a vast array of archive footage, the film takes a freewheeling journey through the history of flamenco.
“Isaki Lacuesta is without any doubt one of Spain’s most creative and innovative directors,” said Latido president Antonio Saura. “With ‘Flamenco Sketches’ he takes us on an unrivalled road of discovery of art, perception and joy.”
Rather than offering a conventional history, the director builds the film as something closer to flamenco itself: stories begin, mutate, collide and disappear; images, music and ideas summon themselves intuitively.
The film jumps from flamenco’s first appearances in the mid-19th century to the arrival of trains, clocks and standardized time; from Thomas Edison’s early moving images of Spanish dancer Carmencita to the relationship between flamenco and the artistic avant-garde; from Vicente Escudero and Man Ray to Francis Picabia, Joan Miró and Marcel Duchamp.
The project has been years in the making. Speaking to Variety in 2024, Lacuesta described it as “a kind of ‘One Thousand and One Nights,’ a story that explains tales, tales of flamenco.”
“What do Edison, Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl, Tarantino and Camarón de la Isla all have in common?” he said. “They all have stories that have to do with flamenco. Flamenco has always been modern and attached to modern history.”
Lacuesta and his co-writers Pedro G. Romero and Luis Parés also probe what happens when an spontaneous, living form is recorded and ‘preserved.’ The film continually circles the paradox of the art form surviving through mutation and contradiction, even as attempts are made to establish what constitutes “real” flamenco.
Its cast of voices includes figures from flamenco, and the arts more broadly including rapper C. Tangana, director of the memorable “La guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés,” dancer Rocío Molina, artist Pedro G. Romero and french philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman.
“Flamenco Sketches” is produced by Tono Folguera for Lastor Media and Guillermo Cascante for Goroka Contents, with Lacuesta’s La Termita Films as co-producer. BTeam Pictures handles Spanish distribution, with Latido selling worldwide outside Spain.
The title echoes Miles Davis’ “Flamenco Sketches,” but Lacuesta’s own sketchbook, like the jazz great, revels in contradiction.
Leave a Reply