The Day of Spanish Cinema: Muerte de un ciclista

Next October 6th we will celebrate the second edition of the Spanish Cinema Day, an event that we hope will be consolidated as part of our annual cultural calendar.

The #SpanishCinemaDay wants to be a collective way of vindicating the weight and importance of our cinema as a cultural heritage, as a generator of a common identity and imaginary, and for this, during a day they organize activities and actions —both in Spain and internationally— that publicize and celebrate the richness and diversity of our cinematography and vindicate the work of its professionals and audiences.

As part of this festival, we present the Spanish-Italian co-production Death of a Cyclist, written and directed by Juan Antonio Bardem in 1955. This essential filmmaker for understanding the Spanish 20th century makes in this historical film a interesting chronicle about the Spanish middle class through the portrait of a couple of lovers who assume very different positions in the face of the social climate that surrounds them.

Starring two stars who had just arrived in Spain in the 1950s, the exiled Alberto Closas and the Italian Lucía Bosé, Death of a Cyclist continues to maintain intact its critical reading and the solvency of cinema of an author in a state of grace.

Synopsis: Juan and María José, boyfriends in a past prior to the Spanish Civil War, meet after a few years of separation —now the war is over— and resume their love. But now María José is no longer free and their love turns into adultery.

[Taken from the Ibero-American Cinema Dictionary (Madrid, SGAE, 2012, p. 1003), by José Enrique Monterde].