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Once again this year, we are celebrating Spanish Cinema Day by turning to our cinematic heritage as an essential source for understanding our 20th-century visual culture. On Tuesday, October 6, the Cinematek in Brussels will screen 'El desencanto' (1976), a film directed by Jaime Chávarri that portrays the decline, secrets, and implosion of the family of Leopoldo Panero—a poet under the Franco regime—amid the reconstruction of Spain during the Transition. Based on the real-life experiences and testimonies of the poet’s widow, Felicidad Blanc, and her three sons—Juan Luis, Leopoldo María, and Moisés “Michi”—the film made a resounding impact upon its release. Produced by Elías Querejeta, it was a bold ethnographic and psychological exploration of the hidden wounds of the intellectual bourgeoisie of the time, a work that lays bare the hypocrisy of a society that was beginning to crumble. Chávarri takes a raw and avant-garde approach to a family world that seems to be fading away, yet in which its protagonists resist and destroy one another under the weight of the paternal myth and the emergence of a new freedom. The film’s focus is on depicting characters who use words as their primary weapon of combat. In the film, we see a portrait of the Panero family that debunks the myth of the perfect family, transforming their traumas into a reflection of the tensions that Transitional-era society itself was experiencing at that time. Finally, within the tradition of documentary cinema—which had been unable to develop its most modernist aspects due to the imposition of the official No-Do newsreel’s perspective and the independent initiatives of industrial and commercial cinema— 'El desencanto' connects with the openness and expansion that this format would experience in the cinema of the Transition and the freedom of expression that flooded democracy—though it would also be an environment that would suffer its first setbacks with the censorship of films such as *Rocío* (Fernando Ruiz Vergara, 1980) or 'Después de…' (Cecilia and José Juan Bartolomé, 1981). October 6, 7:00 p.m. CINEMATEK, Rue Baron Horta 9, Brussels https://cinematek.be/2026-10-06-19-00/el-desencanto