José Mercé

A look at the history and traditions of flamenco music and dance.

A dance troupe prepares for and completes a dress rehearsal of Federico García Lorca's tragic play "Blood Wedding," which is about a bride who runs away from her wedding with a former boyfriend.

The film presents thirteen rhythms of flamenco, each with song, guitar, and dance: the up-tempo bularías, a brooding farruca, an anguished martinete, and a satiric fandango de huelva. There are tangos, a taranta, alegrías, siguiriyas, soleás, a guajira of patrician women, a petenera about a sentence to death, villancicos, and a final rumba.

Film homage to the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, in which they dramatize fragments of his poems and the play "La casa de Bernarda Alba". From his texts, the voice of the poet himself weaves the plot. His characters come to life: El Amargo, which runs from a poem taken from "El Cante Jond" to the "Romancero Gitano". The Woman, blurred and present in so many of his poems. The Mother, a living synthesis of his play-writing. The balcony is open from the hidden Granada to exciting New York. From the rider of tireless riding to the mysterious baroque of Holy Week. From the first babble of the poet to his violent death. Spain is behind its lyric. Also in many images and tensions of the film. The argument of this one wants to approach the argument of a poet. His life and his work, united irremediably.

In his time of greatest splendor, the singer Miguel 'Bambino' Vargas Jiménez (1940-99) was the last frontier of flamenco, an immense musical genre that he developed and brought closer to large audiences: an artist of artists, the idol of the roadside bars, whose inimitable style, scenic magnetism and heartbreaking personality made of his figure a myth, a king without a kingdom, a giant of the popular music of the 20th century.

The Ekipo Ja, a group of sane gypsies led by the gypsy Juan De Dios, is in possession, unknowingly, of a sacred seal able to make wishes to him who possesses it. And who wants to possess above all is the Marquesa, a wealthy stranger who does not hesitate to use cunning Italian art dealer persecuted by the police and associated with the Russian mafia, to remove the seal from Juan de Dios. But neither the Marquesa, neither the Italian nor the Russian, not even the Spanish Police, known the capacity Juan de Dios and his men to mess things up and, incidentally, become involved themselves.