I did not attend any film school or academy. Franco closed the Escuela Oficial de Cine at the end of the sixties. I suppose he did so because he suspected that film can be a powerful weapon to speak about reality. This was true in the case of Spain, where movies critiqued the Franco regime in a cryptic manner such that censorship boards would miss all but the most obvious political charge. Closing the school was a way to prevent any future critics of the regime from employing cinema as a weapon.
According to the politicians of the time, the film school was a nest of reds. And they were right. Censors had missed their vicious political critique, the condemnation behind their savage satireβfor instance, the sexual repression in Viridiana. The realization hit only once reactions filtered in from the various international festivals where the films screened. Far from celebrating the success of the New Spanish Cinema of the s, the regime made it as difficult as possible for those movies to be seen in our country.
But this topic deserves a book of its own. My film school was the Super 8 mm. I shot a bunch of films in the s that varied in duration from five to seventy minutes. I would shoot in the countryside, away from prying eyes, because transvestite characters appeared in most of these films. From the beginning, gender diversity and fluidity were present in my films; we represented an entire variety of sexual options despite the fact that we were still living in the midst of a dictatorship.
In one of these shorts, Sexo va, sexo viene Sex Goes, Sex Comes , , transsexuality was already present. There were no commercial circuits for this type of Super 8 work.
There were some festivals in Barcelona that showcased my work, but most of my screenings took place in photography schools, art galleries, and even at birthday parties.
