Pão Negro

This film swept the board at this year's Goyas (Spanish cinema awards), but after last years Cell 211 ( an enjoyable but unremarkable prison drama) did the same, I wasn't expecting too much.

I'd enjoyed Villaronga's disturbing Aro Tolbukhin, but I wasn't expecting this. One of the best opening sequences you'll see all year leads to a mystery, experienced through the eyes of one boy, that reveals lies, conspiracy and the dark secrets in the heart of a rural Catalan village a few years after the end of the Civil War.

It's magnificently done, and the performances of the children match those of actors such as Sergi Lopez (whose role echoes that in Pan's Labyrinth),Eduard Fernández and Marina Comas.

Scenes such as the boy's father instructing him to uphold his ideals and walk tall, or a powerless mother pleading her husband's innocence, are familiar from more commercial films. Here they are brutally undermined until nothing is left but pitiless self interest.

A chilling study of how war and poverty create monsters.

Black Bread begins with a familiar scene: a man leads his horse and cart through a darkened wood, glancing around with unease at the various forest sounds which break the tense silence. A fairy-tale quality hangs over the scene, the images framed in wide angles and brought to life with rich autumnal hues; perhaps this will be a fantasy parable. When an assailant attacks the traveller, binds him in the cart, and leads the now-blindfolded horse to the cliff's edge, brutally smashing it in the face with a sledge hammer, our stomachs concomitantly fold alongside the illusion that this will be anything but sickeningly real. It is the first clue to us that we are not in for the easiest of rides; many of the images that will come to us will be disturbing, even distressing.

Set in the years following the Spanish civil war, the film portrays the lingering dissent and tarnished political atmosphere of a nation divided. Andreu—the young boy who discovers the wreckage and is caught up in the post-civil war world of deceit that grips his small village as he attempts to discover the truth behind the "accident"—is sent to live with his grandmother, aunt, and cousins when his father—having fought for the losing side along with the murdered man—is forced to flee in fear of his own life. Andreu's journey to discover what happened to the cart and its riders takes him into the darkness within his village, his family, and even himself.

It seems to me that there is a recurrent idea in modern Spanish-language cinema: to explore the issues of the civil war through the eyes of a child. Predating Black Bread, there are a number of films such as Butterfly's Tongue and Pan's Labyrinth which use the same concept. Examining the war through young eyes contextualises it, reducing it to its most fundamental perceptible elements and providing a fascinating perspective on (in the case of the former) the senselessness of condemning people by ideology alone and (the latter) the monstrousness of war and the frivolity of conflict. In a way, Black Bread achieves both of these things, though far more so the second. It demonstrates not the horror of war itself, but the horror of the people war creates; the capability for evil of those left living. The dark truths Andreu unearths are as horrifying as any war, the images he dreams up truly disturbing. The child protagonist is a proxy through whom we see things at their most stripped-down, basic, and shocking, exposing to us the sheer lunacy of humanity's follies. Surprising is the film's tackling of a particular societal issue which gradually becomes the centre of its comment upon our race, and the animalistic prejudices which, sadly, so often characterise us. Worth making mention of is the film's name, something of a motif referring to the secondary theme of class and social standing, commenting upon the sickening imbalance between the wealthy and the poor in times of hardship. Most films would do well to achieve half the depth Black Bread manages with this theme, and it is a secondary one.

A worthy addition to the fray of Spanish civil war dramas, Black Bread is a surprisingly dark and deep examination of war's effect upon the lives and personalities of those who suffer through it. Condemning the capability of ordinary people to do extraordinary evil, it is an impactful portrait of guilt, responsibility, society, and family.

dark movie. about truth and its price, about illusions and the need of lies. the scene - Civil War shadow who represents perfect arena for a kind of story. like many Spanish films about same period, it is an exercise of exorcism. a child front to reality. the fall of veils. the cruelty of discoveries. it is not easy to say if it is a good or bad movie. because the answer is not on screen. the theme, the acting, the images, the chain of symbols, the final are only a circle. a frame. the real answer, one of them, is work of viewer experiences, memories, impressions. Francesc Colomer has an admirable work and the Balkanic layer of story is almost seductive. but something is more important - the large shadows, the heavy air, the powerful emotions, the force of each detail.a film like a string of answers. in skin of a question out of words. only the ash of images. and traces of a deeper war than one from a history lesson

a portrait of Spain after Franco's regime. portrait of the past as root of the fears and vulnerable peace. portrait of childhood looking the source of justice. a novel. and its splendid adaptation. Black Bread could be defined as thriller, mystery or political film. in fact, it is only analysis of grow up in the circle of a wounded world who has not courage to assume the events who defines it. the truth not gives freedom. only creates a way who has ambition to revenge the errors of adults for a cruel pragmatism. a dark film who is useful trip in heart of a community. nothing new. only bitter, cruel and cold. the lost of innocence and the fruits of many compromises as price of survive.and the final answer of a young man who discovers, step by step, the frame of the truth.

Black Bread is an elaborate Catalan Spanish ghost story which begins with a hooded man driving a horse drawn carriage through the woods where he attacks Dionis and his son Culet and kills them by leading the horse off a cliff blind folded. A witness, Andreu, an 11 year old boy goes back to town to report the incident. Farriol, who is the partner of Dionis and also Andreu's father is the lead suspect in the murder, due to his previous opposition to Franco during the war. The mayor was in love with Farriol's wife, Florencia, which creates bad blood until Farriol is forced to leave Spain for France. Andreu's grandmother works for the richest family in the area.

Now things become really complicated. Andreu becomes friends with a tb patient from a monastery who runs around believing that he has wings. Florencia convinces the wealthy woman to take in her son Andreu as a sort of step child in order to have a better life with education at a private school. More mysteries unfold concerning an old murder and Black Bread proves to be an interesting drama.