April 11, 1983 ‘Start over’ of Jose Luis Garci became the first Spanish film to win the Hollywood Oscar for the best foreign language film. Now, more than 40 years after this historic triumph, the film starring Antonio Ferrandis and Encarna Paso premieres in a restored version on FlixOlé. Its incorporation into the reference platform for Spanish cinema comes accompanied by five other Garci films: ‘Approved subject’ (1987), ‘Lullaby’ (1994), ‘Ninette’ (2005), ‘Sunday Light’ (2007) y ‘Holmes & Watson: Madrid Days’ (2012).
At the 55th Academy Awards Gala in Hollywood, The German actress Luise Rainer pronounced, in her own way, the title directed by José Luis Garci granting the first Oscar that had until then been denied to Spanish cinema. With his melodrama of late love in which he paid tribute to an entire generation that saw its youth interrupted by the dictatorship, Garci then prevailed over the Soviet ‘Private Life’ by Yuli Raizman, the Swedish ‘The Flight of the Eagle’ by Jan Troell , the Nicaraguan ‘Alsino and the Condor’ by Miguel Littin and the French ‘1280 souls’ by Bertrand Tavernier.
In ‘Start Again’, the Madrid director introduces Antonio M. Albajara (played by Antonio Ferrandis), a renowned writer, Nobel Prize winner in Literature, who returns to his native Gijón after 40 years of forced exile. On this trip down memory lane he will meet Elena again (Encarna Paso), the love of his life, and both will try to recover the time that was stolen from them.
The courtship of his adolescence, the walks along the beach of San Lorenzo, The visit to the El Molinón lawn These are some of the scenes with which the director tinged Antonio’s farewell to what he experienced, and also to what never came to be, with nostalgia. This song to memory and melancholy of an idealized past, marked Garci’s consecration on the national and international scene, while his victory at the Oscars focused his attention on the new generation of filmmakers in the Spanish industry.
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The film will premiere exclusively on FlixOlé after the restoration process carried out in the platform laboratories, allowing the display of the title in unbeatable image and sound conditions. Next to ‘Start over’, Starting October 4, FlixOlé will add five more films by José L. Garci to its catalog, which will be added to the titles that the platform already had, making a total of 17 feature films by the director available.
Thus, they will be added ‘Approved subject’ (1987), with which the director completed his first decade of filmmaking, evoking his debut work (‘Asignatura pending’, 1977) and accentuating the feeling of failure in second chances.
After several years without filming, Garci would get behind the camera again to begin a period dominated by literary adaptations and that connected his nostalgic feeling with past eras. The first of these adaptations was ‘Lullaby’ (1994), a story about motherhood told in a nunnery that earned nine Goya nominations and five Academy Awards.
Already in 2005, the Madrid-based author of Asturian descent brought Miguel Mihura’s play, ‘Ninette y un Señor de Murcia’, to the big screen with Elsa Pataky putting on the French accent and Carlos Hipólito as the provincial who falls for the charms. of the young, talkative and sensual ‘Ninette’ (2005). Two years later, Garci would return to Asturias to film ‘Sunday Light’Alfredo Landa’s farewell to the world of cinema in an adaptation by Ramón Pérez de Ayala with which he represented caciquil practices in rural Spain.
In his penultimate project, the director decided to pay a double tribute to two novelists, Arthur Conan Doyle and Benito Pérez Galdós, in ‘Holmes & Watson: Madrid Days’ (2012). From the first he borrowed his famous detective character, Sherlock Holmes, to take him to Galdosian Madrid in the context of crimes apparently related to Jack the Ripper.
All of these films will be available on FlixOlé along with other titles that can already be played on the platform: ‘Pending subject’ (1977), ‘Alone in the early morning’ (1978), ‘The green meadows’ (1979), ‘El crack ‘ and ‘El crack 2’ (1981 and 1983, respectively), ‘Continuous session’ (1984), ‘The luminous wound’ (1997), ‘The grandfather’ (1998), ‘You’re the one’ (2000) , ‘Story of a Kiss’ (2002) and ‘Merry-Go-Round c. 1950’ (2004).