On the occasion of A WORM’S TAIL VIEW IS OFTEN THE TRUE ONE: FILMS BY PERE PORTABELLA – the most complete and ambitious retrospective of radical Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella’s work – the ICA Cinema screens Portabella’s debut feature, Nocturno 29 (1968).

Co-scripted by the poet Joan Brossa, the film adopts a loose, fragmentary approach, depicting the lives of a bourgeois couple who engage in extramarital affairs. The title of the film refers to the 29 ‘dark years’ of the Franco dictatorship in Spain and Catalonia. Though indebted to the works of Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman and Buñuel, Nocturno 29 remains entirely fresh and challenging as a forebear of the Barcelona avant-garde that would go on to carve out a radical reimagining of the potential of the moving image.

More information on the full season can be found here.