There is no Catalan Film Festival without Pere Portabella. For this edition we want to showcase his work as producer of some of the biggest classics in Spanish cinema.

Tren de sombras is an experimental silent homage to the origins of cinema, recreating the apparent disappearance of a French photographer in the 1920s.

“In this meditative, beautiful film, Guerín pays tribute to another artist, Gérard Fleury, an amateur filmmaker who disappeared in 1930 while scouting a location for a silent film. Home movies, re-creations, and present-day visits to key locations are intertwined and scenes are repeated and restaged, blurring fiction and nonfiction and questioning our ability to judge what is authentic. Fragile and decaying images reveal one view of Normandy, including provocative glimpses into intimate family life; contemporary images suggest another, populated by anonymous people. Underlying the film is the compulsion to salvage a lost and threatened past, a conviction that resonates with the films of Fleury, with cinema in the broadest sense, and with Catalan history.” – Kathy Geritz