ARREBATO / Rapture

Spain
1979. / 110’ / 35mm

Directed by :
Iván Zulueta

Written by:
Iván Zulueta

Producer:
Nicolás Astiarraga

Cast:
Eusebio Poncela, Will More, Cecilia Roth, Marta Fernández Muro

Distribution:
Phone and fax: +34 91 310 55 29
Cell: + 34 625 80 91 98
pacohoyos@telefonica.net

Arrebato (Rapture/Snatched) is a cult, psychedelic film by a controversial Spanish master of underground, visual artist Iván Zulueta, obsessed with multiplying and disintegration of identity (“Who can you be afraid of more than yourself?”), marginal spaces and circular forms, mythical themes of surpassing reality, trance and ecstasy.

José Siragad used to be a rebellious, underground filmmaker but now makes B- horror movies. During his artistic and personal breakdown there appears a mysterious man-child Pedro P., obsessed with search for the essence of film images with his super-8 camera. Zulueta eclectically mixes formats and inspirations, heritage of surrealist madness, expressionistic onirism and Doppelgänger motifs with pop-art. The film is, at the same time, erotic drama, fantasy, psychological horror, vampire movie, essay about the addiction called film, lack of morality and the destructive power of movie images: “the image freezes and flogs you, so that you start thinking about what is that which flows and which stops”.

Clearly autobiographical, autoreferential metafilm is a part of the so called Madrid movement of Post Franco period: libertine spirit, freedom of speech and hedonism, subversion of sex and drugs taboos. This is Zulueta’s only full-length feature film, his “great sick” film.

Iván Zulueta, born in 1943 in San Sebastian, is a Spanish visual artist and graphic designer (posters for movies by Almodovar). First he studied art and graphic design in New York where he discovered underground films, Nouvelle Vague and Pop-art, and then he studied filmmaking in Spain. Some of his short, experimental and TV films:
Ágata 1966, Ida y vuelta 1968, Un, dos, tres, al escondite inglés 1970, Frank Stein 1972,
Leo es pardo 1979, Párapados (Delirios de amor, TV) 1989, Ritesti (Crónicas del mal, TV) 1992