Out in the Open

Spain 1946. Somewhere in the Spanish heartland following a civil war that has brought only despair, poverty and exile, a boy is on the run. He runs and runs, never looking back, finding a hiding place in a gulley. A search party pursues him: dogs, the village menfolk. At their head, the foreman.

When the search party has gone, he faces a hostile, arid plain that he must cross if he is to escape from his pursuers.

But along the way, he meets a Goatherd who changes his luck. He has fought in the Civil War and also has fought in Spain’s colonial wars in Morocco in the 1920s. After the War he decided to abandon society and with just four goats to his name he barely survives.

Initially, man and boy behave like abused animals toward each other. But slowly, a genuine relationship begins to develop. The Boy will have to learn not to mistrust all adults; the Goatherd will once again become accustomed to caring for another person.

Together, they begin a journey through a lawless land, a place where survival is the only rule.

Along the way, they must deal with hunger and thirst and evade the men sent by the Foreman to find the Boy. The Goatherd becomes the Boy’s mentor: he explains his profession and along with that, his understanding of life. The Boy finds in him the teacher he never had. As the days go by, the Goatherd ends up understanding the horror from which the child is trying to run away.

With only three feature films in his filmography, Benito Zambrano is now considered one of Spain’s leading directors. He started his career with "Alone" (1999), a sensitive story of a mother and daughter and their respective struggles for survival in contemporary Spain that was both a commercial and critical success. Since then, this gifted but uncompromising director has achieved success on national television with the hit TV miniseries “Father Courage” (2002), as well as two feature films: “Habana Blues” (2005), a portrait of two Cuban musicians that was screened at Cannes' Un Certain Regard, and “The Sleeping Voice” (2011), a drama set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Throughout his career Benito Zambrano's films have been honored multiple times, including several awards from the Spanish Film Academy and the San Sebastian Film Festival, the Berlinale Film Festival or the Spanish Actors Guild, among many others. Benito’s films have always focused on survival and how the individual deals with the injustice of society. His new movie, OUT IN THE OPEN (2019) reflects this concern, while taking his body of work to a new level through spectacular photography, along with impressive costume and art design.

FILMOGRAPHY:

2019: Out in The Open (Intemperie)
2011: The Sleeping Voice (La voz dormida)
2005: Habana Blues
1999: Solas/ Alone