When too much Eduard Fernandez is never too much, two Eduard Fernandez starers throw this Spaniard in the works in this year’s 2025 HSBC Spanish Film Festival.
Bus driver versus bureaucracy proves a winning picture of people power in EL 47, a centrepiece of this year’s Spanish Film Festival.
Starring Eduard Fernandez as the belligerent bus driver, Manolo Vital, EL 47 is a fiction facilitated by fact or, you might say, bussed in on a true story.
In the boondocks of Barcelona, an impoverished barrio is without many basic services, including a bus that can take the workers and the shoppers into the town.
The bureaucracy says no but barrio dwelling bus driver says yes and after many bureaucratic knock backs stages a defiant act of civil disobedience.
Solidarity in citizenship, people power rocks!
Every scene is stolen by Clara Segura as Carmen, the nun who married Manolo and has been not only a pillar of support for him but an unswerving advocate for education in the community, defying stale misogynist custom as well as government indifference.
And Zoe Bonafonte as Manolo’s daughter, Joana, is subtly superb.
With a screenplay written by Alberto Marini and Marcel Barrena and directed by Barrena, the look of the film is enhanced by cinematographer Isaac Vila images mixed with archival footage giving this story a visual veneer of verisimilitude.
Also starring the excellent Eduard is MARCO: THE INVENTED TRUTH, the story of a celebrated fake Holocaust crusader who claimed he had been interred in a Nazi concentration camp.
An inglorious impostor, Enric Marco was the antithesis of the Holocaust denier, yet a long way from being Righteous Among the Nations or a Righteous Gentile.
MARCO is a classic tale of good intentions marred by deception and fault.
The 2025 HSBC Spanish Film Festival Sydney 19 June – 9 July: Palace Norton Street, Palace Moore Park, Palace Central and Chauvel Cinema For updates and more information, visit www.spanishfilmfestival.com and join the mailing list or follow; Facebook @SpanishFilmFestival Instagram/Twitter@spanishfilmfest
