Professor Santiago Fouz Hernández introduces a Bigas Luna film at the 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival (SSIFF)

This year’s guests included Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton, Pamela Anderson, Pedro Almodóvar, Sean Baker, Costa Gavras, Mike Leigh, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Jos hua Oppenheimer, François Ozon or Mohammad Rasoulof. Pedro Almodóvar received this year's prestigious Donostia Award. 

Bigas Luna’s Tattoo was chosen for the closing event of the festival’s Klasikoak (Classics) section. This new version of Bigas Luna’s Tattoo was restored by the Filmoteca de Catalunya using the original print and previously censored footage preserved by one of the film’s original producers. It was digitised as part of the Filmoteca de Catalunya’s conservation and recovery project. 

The sold-out event included introductions by the directors of the Catalan Cinematheque, Dr Pablo La Parra Pérez, and the Basque Cinematheque, Joxean Fernández. Fouz Hernández’s talk discussed the historical context, the importance of the setting (Barcelona and Amsterdam), the dialogue the film establishes between 1970s Spain and Europe, Iberian identities in the film, censorship, issues of adaptation (of Montalbán’s novel) or masculinities and male bodies in the film, with special emphasis on the main protagonist’s facial scar and meanings of the tattoo at the centre of the narrative. 

The presentation included material from Fouz Hernández’s new monograph, The Films of Bigas Luna, which will be published by Manchester University Press in 2025.

Since 2015 Prof. Fouz Hernández co-organises The Bigas Luna Tribute, a series of international retrospectives, in collaboration with the filmmaker’s daughter, Betty Bigas and, since 2020, produces a Bigas Luna podcast, where he and co-host Prof Carolina Sanabria (Universidad de Costa Rica) talk with members of the film industry and other Bigas Luna specialists about his film legacy. 

Learn more about Prof. Fouz Hernández’s research