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Pere Portabella i Ràfols ( Catalan pronunciation: [ˈpeɾə ˌpɔɾtəˈβeʎəj ˈrafuls]; born in 1927) is a Spanish politician, director, and producer. In 1977, he was elected Senator in Spain's first democratic elections and participated in the writing of the Spanish Constitution.
As a filmmaker Pere Portabella has been a relevant presence in the Spanish film world for the last fifty years. With Films 59, his production company, he fostered some of the most emblematic films in the history of Spanish cinema.
For the second year in a row, the boldest new work I saw at Cannes was by Pedro Portabella. Umbracle, a multi-faceted statement of political despair from Franco Spain, is far more ambitious and open-ended than last year’s Vampir-Cuadecuc, and even harder to encapsulate.
Formed under and in response to the repressive exigencies of Francoist authoritarianism, Portabella’s rejection of unity resonates allegorically as a form of democratic opposition to El Caudillo’s imposition of a single national identity, a single ideology, and a single state religion.
- Erika Balsom
Pere Portabella’s 1972 film Umbracle works in a similar way, consistently priming, then undermining, forward impulses toward a linear narrative through various strategies, most conspicuously by intercalating heterogeneous sequences.
- Matt Losada
Box Set Pick: Pere Portabella Complete Works. Miró l’altre. In Pere Portabella’s short Lectura Brossa (03), avant-garde Catalan poet Joan Brossa describes himself as an “inventor of strategies” and an “unsubmissive opponent of official culture”—two definitions that also well describe the role assumed by Portabella in the bosom of ...
Presented from September 26 to October 6, 2007, in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, Pere Portabella features the director's first appearance in the United States for the U.S. premiere of his latest film The Silence before Bach (2007) on September 26.
