Jacinto Esteva Grewe

In that "Girona grisa i negra" which gave the title to the book by Narcís-Jordi Aragó, Just M. Casero, Jaume Guillamet and Pius Pujades published in 1972, recalling poems by Josep Carner, there are also small drops of color and breakage, as he assumed, a few years earlier (in February 1968), the Jacinto Esteva troupe for the filming of Después del diluvio, played by Mijanou Bardot (the sister of the legendary Brigitte), Francisco Rabal and Girona's Francesc Viader, to which I was able to interview at the legendary Arc bar, one of the few existing strongholds at that time for the intellectual and restless Girona. The film was shot among the scenes of the burnt forests, a year earlier, of the Gavarres in Girona. With Jacinto Esteva we follow the articles on the so-called "school of Barcelona".

Jacinto Esteva Grewe (Barcelona, 1936-1985), creator of Filmscontacto (1965), founder of the school and co-director of Dante is not only severe, the manifesto film of the same, defined this movement for me in 1968: It is an attempt to seek a break with the old schools and create new forms of cinematic expression.” A goal that he still attempted in a way that was perhaps too imprecise, disruptive yes, but without full coherence. So it was with Dante... and also in his ambitious Después del diluvio.

This pioneer of the Barcelona school, in 1963 had started an altarpiece of black Spain, Este país de todos los diablos, a faithful continuation of the documentary filmmaking style of Las Hurdes, Tierra sin pan, by Luis Buñuel (1932 ), which could not be completed until 1970, with continued censorship problems, and to which he had to change the title to Lejos de los árboles. After stays on the African continent, first to make two documentaries about the liberation struggle of Mozambique, both unfinished, and then to set up a safari company, he returned to Barcelona, where he died prematurely in 1985, and five years later his friend Joaquim Jordà dedicated a very personal documentary portrait to him with El encargo del cazador.