Mudanza. Screening and roundtable with Pere Portabella

The Huerta de San Vicente, the summerhouse of the García Lorca family beginning in 1925, was vacated by its inhabitants in 1939 when the family went into exile in the United States after the Nationalist militia killed Federico García Lorca in August 1936, followed a few days later by the murder of Manuel Fernández Montesinos, the mayor of Granada and husband of Concha García Lorca.

It is important to know this history to understand why the film by Pere Portabella (Figueras, 1929) stops at the point of the departure, the removal, the dispossession, the expropriation.

Portabella could have used any of these words, which are more legal and social, as the title of his film, but he chose Mudanza [The Move] (2008), which is at once commonplace and replete with Spanish baroque and classical resonances. It is a title that contains the departed and borders on the concepts of fate and the wheel of fortune.

Filmed in Granada at the Casa-Museo de Federico García Lorca, Mudanza was conceived of as a companion piece to the exhibition Everstill / Siempre Todavia curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Mudanza, 2008, digital, colour, sound, 59'