Marina Heredia sings a satire from the balcony. The Granada cantaora, one of the great figures of flamenco today, ends the film with a caña, accompanied by the guitar of Miguel Ángel Cortés. The film recovers historical shots, such as those Sánchez-Montes himself recorded in 1986 in the Isabel la Católica theatre during a performance entitled Recordando el camino, which featured older dancers, all now deceased, who played a leading role in the golden age of zambra. They met with directors, producers and great international actors and actresses who were delighted by the authenticity of their dances in a Granada still clinging to the long shadow of its Spanish-Muslim past.
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“Granada is more past than future,” laments the filmmaker. He admits that much of his work has been an attempt to fix the cultural memory of his hometown, but the truth is that another part of his films has flown far and wide in search of characters linked to international music or literature. There is in his films, on the one hand, a deep intellectual background and, on the other, a heterodoxy to take paths that go beyond the classical arguments that the script wants to impose. And something else: in his films shot in his hometown, Alhambra is one of the main protagonists. José Sánchez-Montes created Ático Siete, directed Sacromonte Films, and in 2019 launched his latest venture, Siesta Producciones. He was director of the Granada International Film Festival Cines del Sur from its first edition in 2007 until 2018. He has directed around twenty feature documentaries, series and television programmes. He directed, for example, Morente sueña la Alhambra, and his most recent works include the documentaries Cante Jondo, Granada 1922, a recovery of the centenary of the Cante Jondo Competition organised by Manuel de Falla, and El universo en una caja, about the figure of Mariano Fortuny Madrazo, both from 2022. The architect Leopoldo Torres Balbás was featured in the film La Alhambra en juego (The Alhambra at stake) in 2020.
