BILBAO
dir. Bigas Luna, 1978
Spain. 98 min.
In Spanish and Catalan with English subtitles

FRIDAY, APRIL 5TH - 5 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 11TH - 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 15TH - 10 PM

A disturbed middle-aged man (Ángel Jové) becomes obsessed with a stripper and prostitute named Bilbao on his nighttime prowls through Barcelona’s Chinatown. He follows and studies her, setting a plan in motion for her abduction. Shot in 16mm, the second feature shot by Bigas Luna following TATUAJE (1979) was actually his first to premiere on Spanish screens, shattering the taboos of Spanish society of the era and inaugurating a cinema of iconoclasm and eroticism.

In BILBAO, we share a dangerous intimacy with our obsessive protagonist. His thoughts and words, images and objects, sounds and pieces of music repeat incessantly over the course of the film, haunting him and us, as they reappear in sinister unexpected ways, stained by the rising tides of his lust and shaped by the shifting contours of his perversions. His everyday objects turned fetish objects become our fetish objects, as we join him in the crafting of his idealized sex object and the construction of his ultimate crime.

“Luna's debut is a wonderful ample catalog of perversions, a voyeuristic exercise full of suggestive imagery… that brings the most fetishistic and twisted Alfred Hitchock to the damned and dirty Barcelona of the late seventies.” -Xavi Sánchez Pons

Each screening of BILBAO will be preceded by a video introduction from Carolina Sanabria, author of Bigas Luna, El ojo voraz.