While Alejandro Amenábar's war lasts.
This Friday September 27th premieres while the war lasts , The expected Alejandro Amenábar's new film. The director has returned to shoot in our country fourteen years after the sea inside , so we are about to tour the locations chosen for his new film.
While the war lasts narrates the last experiences of Miguel de Unamuno (played by an unrecognizable Karra Elejalde ), since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until I meet him with Francisco Franco (incarnated by the chameleon Santi Prego ) and his famous speech from "You will win but you will not convince."
The start of the war caught a septuagenarian Unamuno who had already spent half his life as rector of the University of Salamanca . He is therefore in the Castilian-Leonese capital where most of the action of the film takes place, and where much of the filming took place, which began in ** Salamanca ** on Monday, May 28, 2018, and lasted five more weeks.
Most of the filming was done in Salamanca.
“For me it is important to step on the real place where my characters have lived” , explains Amenábar himself.
“I felt a very deep connection when I visited the house of Ramon Sampedro in the sea inside, it happened to me in Ágora when I stepped Alexandria . I felt that same emotion Unamuno's house , especially when I discovered the corner where he died while warming himself with a brazier. The mark of the charred wood is still preserved," adds the director.
Amenábar assures that not only the institutions turned to them during the filming, but the entire city. " People crowded the streets where we shot and observed with the utmost respect, the extras who participated in the filming gave themselves up in each take”.
Santi Prego plays Francisco Franco.
With which, we will see many of the places of the University of Salamanca , such as his schoolyard or the recreations of the writer's office and the assembly hall (where the famous speech in which he faced Millan Astray masterfully performed by Edward Fernandez ) . Also the façade and the interiors of the Unamuno's house (Calle Libreros, 25), now converted into a museum.
Another recurring enclave is the Roman bridge , from where we attend privileged panoramic views of the city while we see the protagonist walking with his friends, the protestant pastor Atilano Coco ( Luis Zahera ) and the university professor Salvador Vila ( Carlos Serrano-Clark ) .
With them he also frequents the Coffee Novelty (the oldest in the city, still open today), in the Plaza Mayor, where the film begins with the declaration of a state of war.
The actress Patricia López Arnaiz.
We will also recognize other streets of Salamanca, such as embroiderers, Company, Cervantes and Veracruz as well as the environment of the Church of San Martin , the San Benito Square , the Episcopal palace , the Pontifical University and the old cathedral.
“We have shot in the same streets through which our characters moved and we have tried to return them to their time. This has required physical and digital interventions, because many things have changed since 1936 , even in a city as well preserved as Salamanca”, points out Juan Pedro de Gaspar, art director.
One of the key moments in the development of history is when Franco decides to go to Toledo to save the rebels who had taken refuge in the Alcazar. In this way we will see the city through recreations of documentaries of the time, extracted from the NO-DO files and from the movie No news in the Alcázar and mixed with new recordings.
But Amenábar would also stop by in person after finishing in Salamanca to shoot, between Monday 25, and Wednesday 27 June 2018, several shots in the Tavera hospital.
The film has been shot on real sets.
Then the director went up to Biscay , where he had already been looking for an idyllic landscape to frame a recurring dream of the writer from Bilbao in the film: reading a book in the arms of his young wife, Concepcion Lizarraga , while she caresses his hair until he falls asleep.
In the town of Zeanuri he would find the shade of a mighty oak, in a corner of a field, from which the precious crests of the Aldamin summit . And there he would shoot the dreamy scenes on a sunny Friday, June 29, 2018.
**The rest of the shooting took place in Madrid **, possibly the recreations of interiors on set, or of some places such as the Franco's Headquarters in Cáceres (the Palace of the Golfines de Arriba ) or of Spanish Protectorate in Morocco . He also recorded several scenes in the Chinchon town.
While the war lasts opens in our cinemas this friday september 27.
In theaters this September 27.