RAISE RAVENS

RAISE RAVENS (CRÍA CUERVOS), 1976
Spain | DVD, Color, 110’ | Spanish
Director: Carlos Saura
Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Mónica Randall, Florinda Chico

Cría Cuervos is as much a historical parable taking place at the end of the Franco regime as it is the drama of a dysfunctional family. Nine-year-old Ana, who has lost her mother after a long illness, witnesses her father, a brutal generalissimo, expiring from a heart attack while having sex with the wife of his best friend. Cría Cuervos follows, between dream and reality, the world of Ana who fantasizes that she has murdered her father. In a sense the child in this film stands for Spain’s younger generation, brutalized by the Franco regime, waiting for it to die out but wanting to have killed it. Through an allegorical drama about loss seen through the eyes of a small child Saura once again takes a period picture. This fragile and introverted film, which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, is a classic that deserves to be placed alongside Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander or Cries and Whispers.