SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain – Paco Rabal worked with Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni and Carlos Saura, made more than 200 films and built a career spanning Spain, France, Italy and Mexico. In “200 Lives, Paco Rabal,” the Spanish screen legend gets one more role: Narrator of his own life. Directed by Vanesa Benítez, the documentary world premieres as the closing film of San Sebastián Festival’s Made in Spain section.
Latido Films handles international sales on the Spain-France-Mexico co-production, produced by Spain’s MLK Producciones and Horizon Media with France’s Plan B et Compagnie and Mexico’s Monstro Films. Its key discovery is a collection of cassette recordings Rabal recorded his memoirs on. Combined with his Super 8 films, photographs, videotapes and other family material, they allow the actor, who died in 2001, to drive the film himself.
Other testimonies remain in voiceover, while Rabal’s recordings and archive drive a film structured partly as a last dream, with the actor looking back on his life at the moment of death. Hours spent watching his home movies, reading his diaries and listening to the tapes revealed dreams as a returning fascination. He even found himself on trial in his dreams,” she said.
Rabal repeatedly returned to Cuesta de Gos in Murcia, where he had grown up, filming family scenes on Super 8. He died in Bordeaux while returning to Spain, having recently played Francisco Goya in Carlos Saura’s “Goya in Bordeaux,” a film which won him the Goya for best actor. Yet the doc-feature also uses him as a route through European and Latin American cinema.
That international history even feeds the project’s co-production structure. Rabal’s career had many politically divided lives. A star of Franco-era Spanish cinema, he would become associated with filmmakers and political currents distant from that world.
What remained constant, Benítez argues, was his understanding of acting as work. Spain has no shortage of “subject matters, stories and characters,” he argues. The work begins much earlier, in developing projects with international potential “from the very conception of the idea.” With Rabal, at least, that international dimension comes ready made with its subject.
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