How to make your first film, compete at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and not die trying.

We're in the dark, to one side of the screen in the Tabakalera Donostia cinema. Our film, El último arrebato , is going to be shown to the public for the first time. It's my first feature film as a director —as co-director with producer Enrique López Lavigne —and we're competing in the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section of the 73rd San Sebastián Film Festival . A section parallel to the official section that seeks "new perspectives and forms, a truly open and risky zone." Tickets sold out on the first day: there's some anticipation because El último arrebato follows in the footsteps of Iván Zulueta , a cult film director who made a single work that is beginning to be considered one of the best films in Spanish cinema: Arrebato , shot in 1979 and released in 1980, in the first throes of the post-transition era. What's more, in this Babelia survey , in which fifty-three critics and film experts voted, it is considered the best Spanish film of the last half-century: Zulueta "could have been the most relevant director in Spain , and who knows, in Europe. His heroin addiction prevented him from focusing on film."

Arrebato is a mysterious, mutating film that reveals a new twist with each viewing . It's about a B-movie director, José Sirgado (played by Eusebio Poncela , who died less than a month ago on August 27), who receives a mysterious can of film sent by Pedro ( Will More ), an amateur film director who has just disappeared. The fascination with cinema - and drugs - that unites these two characters will eventually lead them to their downfall, in one of the most memorable endings in horror cinema? This atypical vampirism film also features Cecilia Roth and Marta Fernández Muro , two essential actresses in the later Almodóvar universe. As if by a fateful prediction, after premiering Arrebato at the now-defunct Cine Azul in Madrid without much success, the man destined to become the most promising and modern filmmaker of the Spanish avant-garde returned to San Sebastián and took refuge, like a vampire in his crypt, in the family home until his death in 2009, with only a couple of fleeting reappearances. His legend cannot be separated from his heroin addiction, which is also one of the central themes of Arrebato .

El último arrebato (The Last Rapture) begins—it began three years ago, when we began this journey—with this question: Why did Zulueta disappear? What did he do in all those years of (almost) emptiness? Where is he buried? Because, as in The Ring (2002), Zulueta ended up following in the footsteps of his film's protagonists, as if everything related to that mysterious can of can Pedro sends were the first link in a curse. " Arrebato is, at the same time, a debut feature and a testamentary film," critic Carlos F. Heredero declares in our film. Because El último arrebato is at times a documentary, at times a thriller, and at times a horror film. An unorthodox proposal that we hope will find its small audience.

After almost ten years working as a critic for El Confidencial , I'm back on the other side. In that silence before the opening credits, I only hear my racing pulse, which in my head sounds like a war drum. This is the first stop on a festival route that will also take us to Sitges and Seville . Like all films made without a budget and without a goal, El último arrebato was the result of a series of improbabilities. Carlos Guerrero , a young producer and distributor specializing in documentaries and re-release films, had contacted Paco Hoyos , one of the biggest distributors of the 1990s, now retired, who owned the rights to Arrebato .

Hoyos had been Enrique's boss more than two decades ago at the now-defunct distribution company Cinemussy. Like an astral alignment, at the end of that same year, 2022, the Spanish Film Library rescued, thanks to the work of Virginia Montenegro , Zulueta's executor and best friend, hours and hours of Zulueta's unreleased Super8 films, which without her efforts would have been lost. Like Pedro, the character in Arrebato , Zulueta dedicated himself to making home movies, recording experiments with light, textures, and, above all, recording himself. Because what is Arrebato if not the story of a man obsessed with recording himself until he disappears ? Now, in the age of selfies and Instagram reels , it may not seem so unusual, but in the 1960s and 1970s, the eras to which the found footage belongs, it was.

In that confluence of coincidences, Guerrero proposed to Enrique that they make a documentary. But not as a producer, but as a director . In 2004, Enrique had co-directed with Juan Cavestany The Amazing World of Borjamari and Pocholo , a comedy considered somewhere between abjection and cult, a cornerstone of the post-humor movement, according to an article by critic Elsa Fernández-Santos . He hadn't directed anything since. That same year, I had just finished the Film Academy Residency, where I had participated with a horror project. Enrique, who is my partner, accomplice, and with whom I worked on the script for Siege (2023), by Miguel Ángel Vivas , suggested that I co-direct the film with him. When I ask him why, he answers: " I was terrified of facing criticism ," he replies. "And beyond being a declared fan of Arrebato , I didn't understand what my personal connection to her was, if I hadn't met Zulueta."

So, how do we approach Zulueta's work? These three years of the process have been a bit like the journey of Apollo XIII : we just wanted to make it to the end alive. This final burst was made with little money and a lot of stubbornness , with long periods of pause and not knowing if we'd be able to finish it. If there's one good thing about making a film with almost no budget, it's the freedom. The freedom to rethink it, the freedom to change it, and the freedom to put it in a drawer if it doesn't turn out the way you wanted.

What we were very clear about from the beginning was that we didn't want a talking-head documentary. What we were very clear about from the beginning was that we wanted to hybridize the documentary genre with fiction . In Arrebato, what happened behind the camera was conveyed through what was filmed in front of it, and it's in that limbo that we wanted to inhabit. Many things happen over the course of three years, and we've been integrating some of them as the film was being built. The protagonists are those who participated in Arrebato - Poncela , Chávarri, Fernández Muro, Carlos Astiárraga - or those who were involved with it - Jaime Chávarri, Virginia Montenegro, Paco Hoyos -, but we also appear, the film's crew - along with the director of photography, Álvaro G. Pidal ; the sound engineer, Eduardo Esquide ; and the assistant director, Susana González -, surviving the uncertainties and vicissitudes of making a film.

Few people knew Iván Zulueta. In many of the Super 8 films, at parties, he was always the one carrying the camera, a gesture that sets him apart from the rest. Except for Virginia Montenegro, who met him in his teens and was with him until his death—she is the only one who, until now, knew where Zulueta is buried—few were able to penetrate the zeal with which a person in constant evanescence guarded his privacy. A mysterious personality that we have been building through the different accounts of those who knew him, among them Jaime Chávarri , director of El desencanto , one of the most important titles in Spanish cinema, a filmmaker for six decades (he competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes), and a restless mind devourer of culture . The man who was initially going to be just another interviewee in El último arrebato (The Last Snatch) ended up being the other protagonist and also co-writer, in addition to the hand that has guided us through the research on Zulueta.

Chávarri met Zulueta "at a party" in the 1960s, he always says, and he was one of his best friends in those early years when they were both starting out making films. Zulueta is precisely the protagonist of Ginebra en los infiernos (1970), Chávarri's first feature film, an underground film about a love triangle that has just been restored and was until recently impossible to find. In Arrebato (The Last Outburst), Chávarri participated by offering his family home, La Mata del Pirón, as the setting for the film and giving Zulueta some images from a trip to India that ended up being integrated into the final cut. El último arrebato (The Last Outburst) also contributed his home, the one in Madrid, and countless photographs, home movies and, above all, memories . And his sense of humor to a script that started out taking itself too seriously.

However, after the premiere of Arrebato , which was a failure—more with the public than with the critics—Zulueta lost contact with most of his friends and withdrew into his inner world, accompanied by, redundantly, his best companion: heroin. As critic and former director of the Sitges Film Festival, Àlex Gorina, has aptly pointed out, "Zulueta was a mystic": isolated from the world, like a hermit, he needed the substance to reach those other levels of consciousness . But heroin is indomitable and it ended up leading him to self-destruction. "He was too sensitive for the world," Virginia Montenegro states at another point in El último arrebato .

The Last Rapture , like Rapture , is a reflection on time, on cinema's impossible ambition to stop time, since what is recorded, what is filmed, is intrinsically past. It is also a film about memory, about the inability to return to the places of yesterday , which no longer exist, which have been replaced, which are deteriorated. It is a film about ghosts and about people who disappear but remain trapped in a frame. Weeks after we were informed that our film would be competing in San Sebastián, we received a phone call: Eusebio Poncela had died . We had been filming with him just six months earlier on the Gran Vía, in the same place where he had filmed Rapture forty-five years earlier, and now his images took on a different meaning on the screen.

A time-critical editing—a masterwork of craftsmanship—by Luis de la Madrid and Carlos de Visa , who brought a very daring language to the film, which led to many frustrating conversations, many unsociable hours, but also many satisfying experiences. The sound work by José Ignacio Arrufat and Pelayo Gutiérrez elevated the film's expressiveness and was truly entertaining. And the graphic design work by José Luis Algar —the genius behind the credits of, for example, Paquita Salas — reinforced the Zuluete-esque echo of El último arrebato .

The journey to San Sebastián has been not only long, but also winding. We've stopped many times due to lack of money. There have been times when we were convinced there wouldn't be a film . This uncertainty has caused significant friction between the crew. By the time we were shooting the finale, Enrique and I were barely speaking and were prepared to finish the film separately . As also happened with Arrebato , the crew dwindled until, by the final days of shooting, we were down to just three people: Enrique (a creative and energetic force), Álvaro (the director of photography, another of the key creative architects, but also the psychologist of our sleepless nights and our disagreements), and me. And at those moments, we would never have thought we'd make it to the San Sebastián Film Festival . The line between making or not making a film like this is both tiny and gigantic.

The executive production team, comprised exclusively of Pilar Robla , and the post-production coordination team, led by José Manuel Soldevilla , have been instrumental in the film's work. Just when everything seems finished, unexpected problems always arise. By the time the process of making a feature film is over, all you want to do is let it go. But here we are, three years after the journey began, Enrique and I reconciled and united forever in this film, trying to contribute something beautiful to the world. And in the darkened room, suddenly, the first bars of "El último arrebato" appear on the darkened screen, and the film is already flying on its own, and we have survived the journey.

The Last Outburst will be released in theaters on November 21st.