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• The Cervantes Institute opened the legacy that the filmmaker left in the Caja de las Letras in 2008, which is part of the “Berlanguiano” exhibition at the Film Academy

June 10, 2021

The legacy that Luis García Berlanga left saved in the Caja de las Letras in 2008, the content of which was revealed today, is the unpublished script of Long live Russia! film that was to continue the famous trilogy National of the Valencian filmmaker, but that was never filmed. After the opening of the legacy, the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis Garcia Montero, and the president of the Film Academy, Mariano Barroso, they took this script to the exhibition on Berlanga that the Kings inaugurated yesterday and can be visited until September 5.

Long live Russia! it is typewritten, on cannulated folios and also bears the signature of Rafael Azcona, Manuel Hidalgo and Jorge Berlanga. Its objective was to be the fourth part of said Berlanguian trilogy, after the successful The national shotgun (1978), National Heritage (1980) and National III (1982). But the film project was frustrated by various difficulties, especially the death of its main protagonist, the actor Luis Escobar, who played the beloved Marquis de Leguineche.

García Berlanga’s legacy is completed with two other objects: a copy of the book Berlanga, against power and glory. Scenes from a life, an elaborate biography of the filmmaker, written by Antonio Gómez Rufo (Issues of Today editions, Barcelona 1990), and number 465 of the French magazine The Cinema Pre-stage dedicated to the movie The executioner (The executioner), dated October 1997. Starring in an issue of that film magazine meant “consecrating oneself,” explained later the director David Trueba.

Luis García Berlanga himself personally deposited the three objects in an envelope on May 27, 2008, just two years before he died. Today, on the eve of the centenary of his birth (Valencia, June 12, 1921 – Madrid, November 13, 2010), the legacy was opened with the participation of two of his grandchildren, the young Jorge Garcia Berlanga (who spoke heartfelt words about his grandfather) and Fidel, who today opened box 1034, thirteen years after helping his grandfather – already in a wheelchair – to close it.

Visit to Cervantes centers 13 times

Luis García Montero affirmed that Berlanga is a fundamental reference of cinema and of the recent history of Spain, claimed the validity of his film work and assured that the adjective berlanguiano (admitted by the Royal Spanish Academy) implies a way of seeing the world established by the filmmaker.

As for the Cervantes Institute, immersed in its 30th anniversary, he recalled that García Berlanga visited several venues between 1997 and 2008 on at least 13 occasions, and that the institution has organized more than a thousand activities on him in numerous centers, most of them cycles and film screenings (subtitled in fifteen languages), but also colloquia, interviews, tributes, workshops, etc.

This year 2021 includes in its program 297 activities around the work of Berlanguiana, both face-to-face and online. He announced the cycle “Berlanga, la risa amarga”, which will feature directors of the stature of Chus Gutiérrez, Inés París, Trueba, Albadalejo and Cobeaga. It also prepares a program of 12 workshops aimed at secondary school students on the trades of cinema, to which is added the current online cycle “Berlanga celebrates one hundred years”, which disseminates in more than 40 centers four films by the director of Placid insufficiently known abroad.

For his part, Mariano Barroso thanked the Cervantes Institute for its generosity in this event for “the importance of the symbolic”, for the recognition of the role of great filmmakers and because “it makes us feel very proud to belong to the world of cinema.”

José Sacristán, Mónica Randall and David Trueba

This was followed by an informal colloquium in the auditorium in which the audience laughed out loud when the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences read the first two scenes from the script. Long live Russia! that take place at the Madrid-Barajas airport with the arrival of a plane with the last exiles in Russia, who greet the prosperous Spain of 1992. An unpublished script for a film that “has no director or producer”, but which aims what could have been and was not, said Barroso.

The colloquium brought together the actor Jose Sacristan and the actress Monica Randall –Co-stars of several Berlanga feature films– moderated by the film director, producer and writer David trueba.

At the round table “Berlanga is 100 years old”, they chatted in a casual tone about personal experiences, anecdotes and even some eschatological secret. They mentioned the freshness and naturalness of the countless secondary, the difficulties of the sequence shots (long shots without cuts) that the Valencian director liked so much, his disagreements with the actor Adolfo Marsillach when he replaced Luis Escobar, the fetishism inherent in his films, the freedom, dubbing or his low level of knowledge outside of Spain (which would not happen “if he had been a persecuted Jew,” said Mónica Randall).

In short, an interesting journey through the career of someone who “is a benchmark for anyone who wants to dedicate himself to film,” said David Trueba, who repeatedly recalled his affable, funny and generous character, as well as the censorship he suffered or the unfinished projects in his first stage, until he achieved a blazing success with The national shotgun.

The double tribute of the Instituto Cervantes concluded with the transfer of the script, by García Montero and Mariano Barroso, to the neighboring headquarters of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, to join the show Berlanguiano. Luis Garcia Berlanga 1921-2021. As for the rest of the legacy, it was once again kept in the Caja de las Letras, until it became part of the Patrimonial Library of the Instituto Cervantes, at its headquarters in Alcalá de Henares.