La sombra de las cuerdas

In this Oscar Winning documentary short film, students in their final year at the National Ballet School of Canada are seen learning the flamenco from Susana and Antonio Robledo, who come to the school every winter to conduct classes which are held after the day's regular schedule has ended.

Documentary based on the figure of Manuel Agujetas (Manuel de los Santos Pastor 1939-2015), mythical cantaor and one of the last representatives of the Flamenco de Jerez school. Essential figure of flamenco.

Enrique Morente's three sons tell the story of their father: the most revolutionary flamenco in history. Despite criticism from purists, he opened cante jondo to cultured poetry, brought it closer to young university students, explored its Arab roots and paired it with rock and other contemporary sounds. Much of the Spanish music of the last decades is heir to his findings.

In his time of greatest splendor, the singer Miguel 'Bambino' Vargas Jiménez (1940-99) was the last frontier of flamenco, an immense musical genre that he developed and brought closer to large audiences: an artist of artists, the idol of the roadside bars, whose inimitable style, scenic magnetism and heartbreaking personality made of his figure a myth, a king without a kingdom, a giant of the popular music of the 20th century.

The film presents thirteen rhythms of flamenco, each with song, guitar, and dance: the up-tempo bularías, a brooding farruca, an anguished martinete, and a satiric fandango de huelva. There are tangos, a taranta, alegrías, siguiriyas, soleás, a guajira of patrician women, a petenera about a sentence to death, villancicos, and a final rumba.

"Nueve Sevillas" is a heterodox psycho-geographical profile of the new flamenco in Seville. Nine characters coexist with the great flamenco artists of today.

A musical, and also a reflection on watching, on trying to escape an anthropocentric gaze and also on watching itself in cinema. Featuring mares and horses: Triana, Víctor K, Bambi Sailor, San Special Solano, Buck Red Skin, Onkaia, Cool Boy, the donkey Agostino, the mule Guapa. And also Alfredo Lagos, Raül Refree, María Marín, Pepe Habichuela, Virgina García del Pino, María García Ruiz, Pilar Monsell, María Pérez Sanz.

The documentary is a summary of Paco de Lucía's career, his art, his human category and his life, from his first artistic steps to his last professional steps, which have been marked by flamenco. Numerous testimonies and interviews carried out between 2010 and 2014 are exposed.