Los caballos mueren al amanecer

Selected filmography: Los caballos mueren al amanecer (2022), Enero (2019), 24/07 (2016).


Out of competiton. Opening night

World premiere 

At least two ways of making films come together here. The first is the film made by Ione Atenea in search of the three brothers and sisters who left the vestiges of their lives in a little house in Vallcarca, and the second is the one that these brothers and sisters ─Antonio, Rosita and Juanito─ thought up in order to give full rein to their unbridled interests and creativity. The eldest brother earned his living as a cartoonist for the Bruguera publishing company, the sister started a career as an opera singer, while the younger brother appears not to have had any career at all, something which also requires talent. They always lived together and one of their interests was to recreate scenes from Westerns, which we assume they did in the non-urbanised areas around Barcelona. Rosita was a consummate horsewoman and the neighbourhood children used to be dazzled when they saw her appear unexpectedly, mounted on the back of a sleek horse. On their death, the hundreds of photos they took of these films with no audience, the scripts and stories they wrote, the recordings of their collaborations on the radio, as well as huge collections of comics and records, remained shut away and forgotten until the appearance of some unexpected heiresses: the film director Ione Atenea and her friends. When they entered the abandoned house, they began to suspect that there was a sense to those objects that had lost their owners. And so, as if it were a collage, Atenea composes a portrait of these individuals, who are not exactly unknown, and offers us two axioms as if they were stolen from a Western set: that horses die at daybreak and that, when someone wants to shoot a film, they always end up finding a way to do so. 

Bárbara Mingo Costales