Main content

The Year of the Discovery

View on the Pragda STREAM site

Winner of two GOYA AWARDS®, The Year of the Discovery explores the contradictions lived in Spain in 1992. In this pivotal year, Spain celebrated both the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in Sevilla, presenting the country as an emerging new democracy to the international community. In the meantime, workers in Cartagena protested a threat to industrial jobs with an uprising that culminated in the burning of the regional parliament.

Shot on Hi-8 videotape entirely within a smoky bar in the city of Cartagena, through one-on-one interviews, complex split-screen compositions, and subtle manipulations of time, Luis López Carrasco’s documentary offers a vivid counternarrative to the official history; one in which industrial labor’s toll on the body and the brutal fracturing of communities testifies against a national mythology of progress.

Related Films

One or Two Questions

A testimony of the capacity of documentary cinema (and archives) to unravel…

The Awakening of the Youngsters

May 16, 2011: Democracy's romantic essence echoed in the streets of Spain.…

The Invisible Hand

With impeccable performances and a surprising ending, The Invisible Hand…