San Sebastian Festival Celebrates ‘Surcos’, a 1951 Film That Escaped Franco’s Censorship

“Surcos” by José Antonio Nieves Conde miraculously managed to pass through the censors’ scissors, to the point of being selected in competition at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.

The San Sebastian Film Festival (September 20-28) in northern Spain is taking a leap into the past this Monday, September 23, to highlight a Spanish film from 1951 that miraculously saw the light of day despite censorship by the Franco regime.

The screening of a restored version of this work, Surcos (The Uprooted) in French), illustrates a recent trend in 7th art festivals, that of screening classics which have benefited from progress in digitization and restoration.

Directed by José Antonio Nieves Conde, Surcos (meaning furrows) whose title refers to the land, tells the sordid and tragic story of a poor family who leave the countryside for the city in search of a better life, as hundreds of thousands of Spaniards did at that time, a dozen years after the end of the Civil War (1936-1939). The film is inspired by Italian neorealism and its stories of urban misery such as The bicycle thief, Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece, released three years earlier.

Qualified as“extremely dangerous“by the censorship of the dictatorship of General Franco (in power until his death in 1975), who did not appreciate the unflattering image it gave of Francoist Spain, the film “had a lot of problems”recalls Enrique Cerezo, the president of FlixOlé, a streaming platform specializing in the distribution of Spanish films and which ensured the restoration of Surcos.

“Remember that at that time, cinema was the number one leisure activity in this country,” “We are very grateful for the support we have received from the AFP,” said Mr. Cerezo in an interview with AFP in Madrid.

But the other miracle that makes the discovery of this film, as well as other classics, possible today is its restoration. “Since always” In the world of cinema, there has been “a serious problem, which is that the producer, when a film (was) finished, (left) the reel in the laboratory, or in warehouses, and forgot about it for years”, even as it deteriorated, Mr. Cerezo said.

Many of these films ended up covered “of a kind of vinegar, which makes their recovery almost impossible, or suffer from other diseases”continues Mr. Cerezo, one of the main Spanish film producers, also president of the distribution company Mercury Films and, in another register, of the football club Atlético de Madrid.

In the darkness of the FlixOlé and Mercury Films laboratories, in the heart of the “City of the Image”, an audiovisual complex located northwest of Madrid, specialists work tirelessly to save films from destruction and oblivion. Reminiscent of a bygone era, the 35mm reels quickly scroll past a shaft of light. A scanner copies them frame by frame, transforming them into a digital file that will serve as the basis for the restoration work.

But before getting there, there was a first step, worthy of detective work: finding the negative of the film or, failing that, one of the copies that were made of it: these could be scattered all over the world, Sophie de Mac Mahon, general manager of FlixOlé, explained to AFP. “It’s a very long work, which is not so much laboratory work, but rather investigation.”she sums up.

Once a digital copy has been located, the calibration work begins, carried out with software shot by shot, image by image, to correct the light, colors and contrast, in order to give the film the tone desired by its director.

The third step is the restoration itself, which consists of removing stains, scratches or traces of mold image by image.

The final result, in high-definition 4K resolution, is a film “which can be seen in even better image conditions than when it was released”, welcomes Aarón Ortega, communications manager at FlixOlé.