Luis Gordo
Voice
La Cosa Nuestra is a journey to the most hidden and surreal face of the bovid-bullfighting universe. Fun and tremendous, operating in iconographic cannibalism. It is a work that shows another reading of the national holiday, demystifying it. Confronts the Spanish bullfighting…
Voice

Misa, a Japanese female photographer visiting Spain to cover the Olympics, is captivated by the young and handsome bullfighter Mario, and is unable to leave Spain even after the Olympics are over. Misa's boyfriend, Nonaka, urges her to return home, but she is captivated by Mario's mysterious charm...

[Here] Pollet made a work that is the very definition of what French critics like to call an ovni or ufo (as in ‘unidentified filmic object’). [It] has been described as being ‘like a comet in the sky of French cinema,’ an ‘unknown masterpiece,’ and an ‘unprecedented’ work that refuses interpretation even as it has provoked reams of critical writing. Its rhythmic collage of images – a girl on a gurney, a fisherman, Greek ruins, a Sicilian garden, a Spanish corrida – is accompanied by an abstract commentary written by Sollers, and only the somber lyricism of Antoine Duhamel’s score holds the film’s elements together. At first viewing, you fear that [it] might fly apart into incoherent fragments. Instead, over the course of its 45 minutes it invents its own rules, and you realize you’re watching something like the filmic channeling of an ancient ritual.

Like every night, Manuel remembers the old days of glory, when after the war he was a famous bullfighter. He and his friend Juan were the fashionable couple. Now Juan is a prominent businessman in bullfighting. But Manuel's feelings toward him have changed radically: an inexplicable hated seizes him when someone mentions his name. It has been more than twenty years since that afternoon, when Manuel was bullfighting and fell to the ground.

Eight years in the making, Boetticher’s portrait of his longtime friend, the famous bullfighter Carlos Arruza, was a labor of love that the renowned director of westerns pursued despite contending with illnesses, bankruptcy, jail time, and lucrative offers from Hollywood. The result is an astonishing work of poetry, immediacy, and violence that fearlessly wrestles with the filmmaker’s own ambivalence about the titular matador’s triumphs prior to his death by automobile accident at the age of 46.

Ferdinand the bull was real. And everything was just like in the fairy tale. But the ending was something completely different. Meet the family who cuddled with the friendly bull in the paddock, the grandson of the keeper who accompanied him on the fateful journey to the arena, and the man who actually saw the bullfight in 1936 and has never been able to forget it. They all have their own story. And of course, we meet the beloved bull in a unique newly discovered film.