Berlanga!!

New York, 2021. The Criterion Collection today distributes Berlanga’s films in the United States. In other countries there have also been numerous editions and retrospectives that were received with remarkable success. What makes Berlanga’s gaze valid for new audiences whose cultural references and contemporary experience have little to do with those of the Spanish filmmaker? To understand the secrets of Berlanga’s cinema, it is essential to know about the person: his family, his friends, his collaborators, and a bunch of prestigious filmmakers and actors guide us through Berlanga’s biography, bringing us closer to his character and the events that shaped his outlook on the world. With the sense of humour that characterised his movies, they exchange arguments, complementing and even contradicting each other, conforming the puzzle that presents Berlanga and his work through his life experiences: the civil war, the dictatorship and the censorship, the transition and the final years of the twentieth century; his successes and failures, his international recognition... Humorous and warm in tone, the film is an attempt to explain the universal validity of Berlanga’s cinema, which defies time with the power of classic film masters.