This class examines some of the award-winning films of the Spanish filmmaker Iciar Bollaín, who is among those who began their careers in the mid-1990s. Their work appears against the backdrop of the huge shadow cast by two important and very different sets of circumstances: the rise to international superstardom of Pedro Almodóvar and the consequence of this for the Spanish film industry, and the political shift to the right in Spain that sparked increasing social tension and dissent. Ms. Bollaín’s films weave together an impressive body of work that forms a riveting portrait of the issues that individuals confront in the complex society of the end of the 20th and first decades of the 21st centuries. A careful examination of the lives of the individuals and the social networks in Bollaín’s award winning films Flowers from Another World, (1999), Take My Eyes (2003), Mataharis (2007), Even the Rain (2010), and The Olive Tree (2016) suggests strategies for surmounting the issues that form our existence as individuals, families, communities, and nations, and also lets one see how gender, racial, and ethnic identities all play into this process.
