The Long Holidays of 1936

Breaking with the defensive, allegorical style imposed by Franco's regime, Jaime Camino burst into the brightening days of the post-Franco era with this oblique but compelling study of the Spanish Civil War. Set in a middle-class resort outside Barcelona during 1936-39, his film charts the social, sexual and personal transformations which those momentous yet tragic revolutionary events brought in their wake. Through the alert and radicalised children and the impotent, squabbling adults, trapped on permanent 'vacation' by the Fascist uprising of 1936, we are made to understand in microcosm the wider political canvas. Using up till now 'forbidden data', trivial events are drawn large in humorous and tragic detail as the Civil War pervades everything.