esRadio, “Cowboys de Medianoche” — José Luis Garci and guests discuss the film on national radio
esRadio, “Cowboys de Medianoche”
On an episode of the long-running national radio programme Cowboys de Medianoche, the Academy Award-winning director José Luis Garci and the critics and writers Luis Herrero, Eduardo Torres Dulce and Luis Alberto de Cuenca discussed the Little Spain documentary.
esRadio, “Cowboys de Medianoche”. José Luis Garci, Luis Herrero, Eduardo Torres Dulce and Luis Alberto de Cuenca on Little Spain.
The programme
Cowboys de Medianoche is the film programme of esRadio, the Spanish national station on air since 2009. It is a tertulia in the proper sense — not an interview show and not a review slot, but four men who have spent their lives around cinema talking about films late at night, for as long as the conversation holds. New releases, what is still in cinemas, what is worth watching at home, and a great deal of classic cinema. It has been running for well over a decade and is still running now.
For a documentary to be taken up there is a different thing from a listing or a notice. Nobody was obliged to cover it; it came up because the people at the table wanted to talk about it.
Who was at the table
José Luis Garci directed Volver a empezar, which in 1983 became the first Spanish film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He was nominated for that award four times. For a generation of Spanish viewers he is also the presenter of ¿Qué grande es el cine!, the programme that taught the country to watch classic film.
Eduardo Torres-Dulce is a film critic of long standing who was also Attorney General of Spain between 2012 and 2014 — an unusual combination, and one that tells you something about the register of the programme.
Luis Alberto de Cuenca is a poet and classicist, a member of the Real Academia de la Historia, and was Secretary of State for Culture from 2000 to 2004.
Luis Herrero, who presents, is a journalist and broadcaster and was a Member of the European Parliament.
What they were discussing
The subject was a first documentary by a first-time director about a neighbourhood most of the audience had never heard of: the Spanish quarter that stood at the west end of 14th Street in Manhattan, with its own shops, its own church, its own benevolent society and its own July procession. Casa Moneo at 210, La Nacional at 239, the church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, the procession of Santiago Apóstol. Most of the people who built it had left Spain — by the end of the nineteenth century the majority were Galicians and Asturians.
It was one of several Spanish broadcasts to take the film up. Antena 3 carried an extended report on its Weekend News, and in New York the City University of New York interviewed the director for Independent Sources.
Related
- Little Spain — clips and television
- Antena 3 Informativos
- CUNY TV — Independent Sources
- The history of Little Spain, Manhattan
- La Nacional — the Spanish Benevolent Society, 1868–2000
- All press coverage