Locarno Spanish Previews Spotlight Spain's Regional Film Boom
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- Locarno held its second Spanish Film Previews, screening excerpts from five titles: Igor Legarreta's Basque period thriller "Blind Ants," Diego Llorente's "How the Lights Get In," Nacho Ruiz Capillas' directorial debut "War Material Captured From the Enemy," Carmela Román's "Bed of Grass," and Paloma Zapata's hybrid doc-fiction "Juliette & Camille."
- Spain produced more features in 2025 than any other European country, according to the Cannes Marché de Film's 2026 Focus report, a surge the Previews framed as driven by well-oiled regional production models.
- The Basque Country offers tax credits of up to 70%, attracting top Spanish producers Buendía Estudios and Lazona to "Blind Ants," which Lamia produced with co-production from Belgium's Caviar; Playtime is handling sales ahead of an Oct. 9 Spanish release via Disney's BVI.
- "War Material Captured From the Enemy" — the directorial debut of veteran editor Nacho Ruiz Capillas ("The Others," "Maixabel") — interweaves his inheritance of 6,000 undeveloped negatives from the Spanish Civil War with his 88-year-old mother's descent into Alzheimer's, which he frames as a meditation on collective forgetting.
- Four of the five preview titles are pan-regional co-productions, and at least three have international partners, with Belgium cited as Spain's go-to co-production territory.
- Two of the films — "How the Lights Get In" and "Juliette & Camille" — probe relationships beyond the cisgender couple: Llorente's feature follows a separated man whose partner builds "a fragile sense of family" with an old school friend, while Zapata's film charts a Peruvian-born woman in Barcelona and a French musician in Galicia bonding over three rainy days of recording.
Why it matters: Spain's ascent to Europe's most prolific film producer in 2025 isn't coming from Madrid alone — it's the Basque Country's aggressive 70% tax credits and a constellation of regional hubs (Catalonia, Galicia, Asturias, Andalusia) pulling in co-financiers from Belgium and beyond. For international sales agents, the takeaway is that Basque-language period pieces like "Blind Ants" now arrive with Disney distribution and Playtime sales attached, a scale previously reserved for Spanish-language studio fare.
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