Spanish filmmaker Jonathan Cenzual Burley’s three movies to date may have been made on microscopic budgets, but they’re rich with intriguing visuals and ideas, along with a healthy love for his childhood home of Salamanca in western Spain.
The 42-year-old – who began his career in the late 2000s with a three-year stint as a junior researcher and runner on UK light entertainment series Never Mind The Buzzcocks – is a virtual one-man band on his productions: producing, writing, directing and even operating the camera.
Burley’s most recent effort, The Shepherd (also ), is a drama, but he started his career with two whimsical Spanish-language comedies infused with magic realism, 2010’s The Soul Of Flies and 2013’s The Year And The Vineyard, which are streaming at SBS On Demand.
'The Soul Of Flies' Source: SBS On Demand
The Soul Of Flies
The Soul Of Flies is a remarkable debut from Burley considering it was made for less than $1500 and used a cast and crew of just seven people. He says the budget limitations dictated what he scripted for the film.
“You write you’re going to have a motorbike because you know you can get one,” Burley in an interview at the 2011 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, “You write you can have two actors because you can only get two actors. It constricts your scriptwriting. You give yourself a set of things you have and write a story around that.”
The movie begins with elderly Evaristo (Feliz Cenzual) reminiscing about his life as a womanising world traveller. Over the decades, only two women bore him children, sons he’s never met and who aren’t even aware of each other’s existence.
“His last wish,” says the narrator (voiced by Burley) “was that his sons would come to his funeral. Not so much for him but, as he had never given them a father, maybe he could give them a brother each.”
We then jump forward in time to the first encounter between the brothers, now grown men, at an abandoned train station on their way to the funeral of the father they never knew.
Gregarious Italian Nero (Andrea Calabrese) is thrilled to meet his Spanish sibling Miguel (Javier Sáez), who’s far more standoffish and is just keen to see his deadbeat dad go in the ground. However, a simple trip to the church in a nearby town becomes a heart-warming journey of discovery as Nero and Miguel are confronted by one unexpected encounter after another travelling by car, motorbike and on foot through the dry farmland and sunbaked small towns of Salamanca.
Brothers on the way in 'The Soul Of Flies' Source: SBS On Demand
The brothers find themselves delayed and waylaid by several eccentric locals including a pyjama-clad man driven by his narcolepsy to attempt suicide, an amiable band of singing thieves, a woman smelling of sunflowers who Nero believes he’s destined to marry and even Evaristo’s ghost.
The Soul of Flies is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
The Year And The Vineyard
For his second feature – a time-travelling dramedy – Burley compensates for his “zero budget” by making full use of Salamanca’s many gorgeous vineyards and historic buildings as the film’s backdrop.
“I like it because it’s a wilderness, a void, with a very special kind of beauty,” he tells . “That vastness can make you feel either like you’re being embraced or like you’re completely alone. And since there is nothing at all there, it’s also like a theatre stage: all the action is contained there, and you can’t get away from it.”
Calabrese and Sáez both return in The Year And The Vineyard, with Calabrese playing Sicilian soldier Andrea and Sáez hamming it up as an eccentric priest.
Andrea is travelling to Guadalajara to fight the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 when he falls through a hole in time and lands in a vineyard in modern-day Salamanca. His appearance is met by a mixture of awe and bemusement by the locals, who suspect he might be an angel, leading to rigorous tests conducted by the village priest. Meanwhile, he’s befriended by timid teacher Tomas (Fede Sánchez Garcia).
Once Andrea gets over his initial shock, he locates the time hole and must decide whether to stay in the peaceful present or return to his war-torn past to fight the good fight. His decision is further complicated when he reads one of Tomas’s history books and comes across a photograph of his girlfriend on the frontline in Guadalajara, adding to the sense of urgency for him to go back and be reunited with her.
Burley does extraordinary work in making the movie seem more expensive than it really is. In the scenes featuring Andrea in 1937, there are no spectacular battles. However, through clever editing, viewers see brief glimpses of the horror and confusion of war, which are still very effective.
The Year And The Vineyard and The Soul Of Flies prove that when a filmmaker has something important to say, a lack of money can’t stop them from telling their unique stories.
The Year And The Vineyard is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
