20/11/2024 - Laura Hojman's documentary showcases the Spanish writer Agustín Gómez Arcos, a literary star in France but unknown in his own country, from whose Franco dictatorship he fled

Presented out of competition in the official section of the 21st Seville European Film Festival, Un hombre libre [+see also:
interview: Laura Hojman
film profile] is the latest non-fiction film by Laura Hojman. The filmmaker has previously focused on other writers in Antonio Machado. Los días azules and A las mujeres de España. María Lejárraga, nominated for the Goya, Forqué and Feroz awards last year. This time, the director's focus is on the writer from Almería, Agustín Gómez Arcos, with a film of successful and effective storytelling using talking busts alternated with archive images, readings of writings by the actress Marisol Membrillo and panoramic landscapes of the Tabernas Desert. The content, however, informs, asserts and, above all, and this is its greatest value, moves.

This is thanks not only to the testimonies of people who knew him personally, such as the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (who even tried to bring the author to the screen) and the actress Marisa Paredes, but also of other intellectuals, such as the playwright Paco Becerra, who have known him through his legacy. The advanced nature of his writing and indomitable critical spirit are praised and the value is highlighted of a talent that did not find his place in his country and had to flee - like a whole cursed generation - to fulfil himself as an artist and as a person.

First to London and finally to Paris in search of creative and sexual freedom, the author of such gems as El cordero carnívoro and Ana no, in which he dealt with gender dissidence, feminism, the right to be different and, above all, memory, an infallible weapon against those who attack individual and collective freedom - he himself was a victim of the fiercest Francoist censorship.

But the film is not a detailed and meticulous biography of the six-time Goncourt Prize finalist. It is an admired and sensitive portrait of the figure and his work, ahead of his time, who came to be admired by figures such as the French President Francois Mitterrand himself, a voracious reader of his writings.

Excerpts from literary programmes on French television also illustrate the presence of the writer from Almería in the literary circles of Paris. Exile there became his survival, but also an open wound where he raged against those who forced him away from his native land.

In this beautiful and moving film, Agustín Gómez Arcos is a figure with a cursed halo. An eternal stateless person who never found the love of his people, a dilettante who fled from convention and embraced dissidence. A rebel with a cause who, at last, with this documentary, takes his rightful place.

Un hombre libre is a production by Summer Films.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)