The 7th day, a Spanish tragedy

[loreta]

This is a very good movie by one of the best Spanish directors, Carlos Saura. This film is a little different in style but Saura has always been a man who seems to understand the soul of Spain and specially of Spanish. In this story he is looking how rage and anger are the culprits of a terrible crime that happened some few years ago, here, not far away in Extremadura in a little village named Puerto Hurraco, and the tragedy happened in 1990.

On the seventh day of creating the world, God rested, Isabel notes, and that is why the most horrible things happen on Sunday. One Sunday the two aging brothers Antonio and Emilio Fuentes come to town with rifles and ammunition. Their revenge engulfs the entire village and its inhabitants pay with their blood. Systematically and in cold blood, they gun down every person that cross their path beginning with the three young Jiménez sisters. 9 are killed, 12 are injured. When the killing spree is over, Isabel is among the wounded survivors, but her two sisters Antonia and Encarna are, like many others, dead. When the police look for the two Fuentes brothers, they find them in a field and they do not struggle to be arrested. The two Fuentes sisters go to an asylum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Day

The full movie but (I am sorry) in Spanish. I was unable to find it with sub-titles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfJALZLIqTY

This crime is very "Spanish" and reminds me of the Lorca's tragedy "Bodas de sangre" (blood wedding) that treats de same subject: hate and anger that people are unable to control or are controled by it that are transformed in vengeance and violence against the other and specially against one self. In all the Lorca's plays these ambivalence me-other-hate-anger-vengeance are very present. The great poet Lorca was very sensitive of the unconscious of this country and you can see Bodas de sangre as a mirror of what was coming, a civil war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Wedding_(play)