Cría Cuervos
| Cría Cuervos | |
|---|---|
Film poster
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| Directed by | Carlos Saura |
| Produced by |
Elías Querejeta Carlos Saura |
| Written by | Carlos Saura |
| Starring |
Ana Torrent Geraldine Chaplin Héctor Alterio Florinda Chico |
| Cinematography | Teo Escamilla |
| Edited by | Pablo Gonzalez del Amo |
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Release date
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Running time
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107 minutes |
| Country | Spain |
| Language | Spanish |
Cría Cuervos ("Raise ravens") is a 1976 Spanish drama film directed by Carlos Saura. The film is an allegorical drama about an eight-year-old girl dealing with loss. Highly acclaimed, it received the Special Jury Prize Award at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival.
Eight-year-old Ana, stoic and quiet approaches her father's bedroom where she hears a woman in bed with her father, confessing her love for him. Descending the stairs, she spies an attractive middle-aged woman, hastily dressing and rushing from the bedroom to the front door of the darkened house. The woman and Ana exchange glances but do not speak. Once the woman has left, Ana enters her father's bedroom and finds the man dead, apparently from a heart attack. As if not really understanding the gravity of the situation, Ana unflappably takes away a half-full glass of milk, which she carries to the kitchen and cleans. In the kitchen, she sees her mother, who chides her for being up so late and sends her off to bed.
Reality and fantasy swap places. The bizarre death of Ana's father, who will prove to be a senior Army officer, is real. The apparently banal appearance of the mother at the fridge, on the other hand, is in fact fantasized by the grieving child. Ana's mother is already dead; her image is only a fanciful illusion of the little girl's mind. Blaming her mother's illness and death on her father, Ana has dissolved a mysterious powder she believes to be a potent poison in his milk glass as a willful act of murder. Her belief in the power of the poison is thus confirmed when her father dies. (Her mother had told her years ago to throw out this powder as it was poison. It turns out it is simply baking soda.)
At the wake of Ana's father, she sees again the mysterious woman she had previously seen fleeing her father's bedroom on the night of his death. The woman, Amelia, is the wife of her father's close friend and fellow military officer. Ana's satisfaction of having rid herself of her father's presence is short lived, for her mother's sister, her Aunt Paulina, soon arrives to set the house in order, turning out to be every bit the cold authoritarian Ana's father had been. The all-female household is completed by the children's grandmother, mute and immobile in a wheelchair, and the feisty, fleshy housekeeper, Rosa.
Ana takes refuge in the basement, where she keeps her 'lethal' powder, and where she is watched by an apparition of herself from twenty years in the future. The adult Ana, looking exactly as her mother, recounts her infancy: 'I don't believe in childhood paradise, or in innocence, or the natural goodness of children. I remember my childhood as a long period of time, interminable, sad, full of fear, fear of the unknown'.
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