The censorship of the documentary Rocío marked the beginning of a frustrated career. Andalusian filmmaker Fernando Ruiz Vergara never made another film. Rocío was seized and legally censored shortly after Spain's transition to democracy for denouncing one of the perpetrators of fascist crimes during the Civil War. The film remains prohibited from being shown in its entirety in Spain to this day. Vergara died in 2011, leaving behind numerous scripts and film sketches he was never able to direct. These films, which existed in imagination and desire, speak of creative forces and dissidence. Recovering the unfinished films of the Andalusian director is a project of research, artistic reinterpretation, and affection.
Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado invite audiences to explore different versions of Rocío, emphasising the results of the confrontation between censorship and its author's persistent resistance, to explore the filmmaker's unfinished filmography. Various pieces of evidence and traces will allow us to speculate about the potential of his unfinished films. Vergara's first film, Otelo a presidente, aimed to promote the political project of the famous Carnation Revolution leader Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, who intended to establish participatory democracy in Portugal. Both failed projects, the political and the cinematic, remind us of a Southern Europe dedicated to an extractivist economic model based on tourism as a means of subsistence.
The performance will be followed by a conversation with Philip Widmann and the presentation of the book ‘Film Undone - Elements of a Latent Cinema’. The book, edited by Widmann, includes contributions from Barquero and Alvarado and many others who present unfinished film projects, cinematic ideas executed in non-filmic media, as well as films that remained unseen. These attempts and careful probes dedicated to singular projects reflect the importance of primary materials before and beyond the film. Latency leads us to think differently about what remained invisible in cinema. It signals a sustained potentiality for things to change condition, to affect us, and to set us in motion.
Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado are filmmakers and researchers. Throughout their careers, they have explored the possibilities of different media, such as cultural television or creative documentary, in which they have specialised. Their films question themes such as absence, memory, history and politics. The use of archive material, both their own and that of others, is one of their main fields of experimentation. Their films include Pepe, el Andaluz and Descartes.
Philip Widmann is a researcher, curator, and filmmaker. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Paranational Cinema - Legacies and Practices’ project at the University of Zurich. He has contributed film programs to festivals, exhibitions, and symposia. His film and video works have been shown in art spaces and film festivals internationally. In 2023, he started the project ‘Film Undone - Elements of a Latent Cinema’ . A book of the same title, edited by Widmann, was published by Archive Books in 2024.
