ABSTRACT
If there is a common thread through Spanish cinema, and so too this book, its name is Elías Querejeta. Born October 1934 in Hernani, in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa, Querejeta is the producer and sometime screenwriter whose name links the emergence of film as a political medium in the Basque Country with the cinema of resistance under Franco. His is the first credit on the most important films of Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, Jaime Chávarri, Mañuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Ricardo Franco, Montxo Armendáriz and many others. He was a player in the New Spanish Cinema of the 1960s, a mover behind key films of the transition and a shaker of the increasingly independent nature of contemporary Spanish cinema. Thus, in a warm office on a freezing December evening, Querejeta listened with mock irritation to the outline of this book and surmised that the intent of its author was to work out what the hell I’m doing in this world’. 1 His first response was to call the Civil Guard, who were ‘to come immediately and chain up this nuisance’. But then he put down the phone – ‘You don’t mind me making jokes do you?’ – and, wine glass in hand, cigarettes at the ready, began to tell his story.
