Set in a romantic vision of 1920s Andalusia, the movie centers on a female bullfighter who never knows her birth mother and is hated by her evil stepmother. One day she ran away with a troupe of dwarves, and became a legend.
No film this year will look as swooningly beautiful, its deep-focus monochrome vividly rendered by the cinematographer Kiko de la Rica, and not many will sound as good, either, thanks to a score by Alfonso de Vilallong.
Loving, willful anachronism... silent black-and-white fairytale Blancanieves-"a local film for a global market"-retells the familiar tale against a backdrop of bullfighting and flamenco in 1920s Seville, with intermittent roosters and dwarfs.
From Spain, here's a miracle of fairy tale repurposing: a version of the Brothers Grimm's "Snow White," set in Spanish bullfighting country in the late 1920s. Writer-director Pablo Berger's Blancanieves goes all the way with its concept, and then further.
