Working with non-actors and a script sourced from excerpted plays, memoirs, and letters penned by political prisoners, Galician filmmaker Eloy Enciso explores the mood and texture of life in Franco-era Spain in the materialist tradition of Straub-Huillet and Pedro Costa. Taking its title from the expression longa noite de pedra ("long night of stone"), which was coined by the poet Celso E. Ferreiro to describe the lengthy period of dictatorship after the Spanish Civil War, the third feature by Galician filmmaker Eloy Enciso explores the postguerra mood and the texture of life in Franco-era Spain by way of unconventional portraiture, the power of words, and stunning atmospheric immersion. Working with non-actors and a script sourced from excerpts of plays, memoirs, and letters from political prisoners, Enciso portrays a variety of characters — both victors and vanquished — as they negotiate a newly reordered society. At the film's shifting centre is Anxo (Misha Bies Golas), who returns home to his unnamed village in the years following the war, his interactions with individuals wielding varying levels of power serving to cast the cruelty of the modern world into stark relief. As he moves through the town, and eventually into the surrounding arboreal landscape, the already muted mood turns towards the mournful as the film approaches its quietly grand finale. Following in the materialist tradition of Straub-Huillet and Pedro Costa, Enciso continues to explore themes that preoccupied him in his earlier work: the human presence in the landscape (specifically, the forest as a container of popular history), the cultural and geographic specificity of Galicia, the search for musicality in language, and the intertwining of history, fact, and fiction. Proceeding dreamily through its elliptical, day-to-night structure, Longa noite is a nocturne of ferocity and resistance, a strange and stirring indictment of fascism that employs beautifully cryptic methods to combat oblivion.

An unconventional portrait of a small village trapped out of time and located on the Galicia-Portugal border, Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro’s Arraianos is one of those rare films where description is inadequate: like the landscape of the village of Arraianos itself, it’s something to experience. Staged Straubian moments of fiction stand alongside documentary moments of everyday village life, with the nameless “actors” farming, sitting in the local bar and singing traditional songs in their specific regional tongue and telling old wives’ tales. We’re never far away from nature--the noisy presence of animals is inescapable--as is the enveloping forest, a place that takes on mythical qualities. But storytelling may be the key, as the film visualizes oral history--a visualization that’s needed, as at one point, when an older lady starts to sing, the lyrics go unremembered. The fictional elements of the piece come from a play by Marinhas del Valle, The Forest, written in the 1960s as a parable of Franco’s dictatorship, but also a great portrait of the Galician soul, their tragic existentialism. The film’s documentary elements thus present a more frontal portrait of the soul of these autarkic people. As the seasons change and the signs of apocalypse grow--a fire rages in the forest--one man promises salvation, while another proclaims the end of the world is coming... In this moving work, memory floats in space, and a way of life dies before one’s eyes.