Cría Cuervos

Eight-year-old Ana, stoic and quiet, approaches her father's bedroom. She hears a woman in bed with her father and confessing her love for him. Descending the stairs, Ana spies an attractive middle-aged woman hastily dressing and rushing from the bedroom to the front door of the darkened house. The woman and Ana exchange glances but do not speak. Once the woman has left, Ana enters her father's bedroom and finds the man dead, apparently from a heart attack. As if not really understanding the gravity of the situation, Ana unflappably takes away a half-full glass of milk, which she carries to the kitchen and cleans. In the kitchen, she sees her mother, who chides her for being up so late and sends her off to bed.

Reality and fantasy swap places. The bizarre death of Ana's father, who is revealed to have been a senior Army officer, is real. The apparently banal appearance of the mother at the fridge, on the other hand, was in fact fantasized by the child. Ana's mother has already died of cancer; her image is only a fanciful illusion of the little girl's mind. Blaming her mother's illness and death on her father, Ana had dissolved a mysterious powder she believed to be a potent poison in his milk glass as a willful act of murder. Her belief in the power of the poison was thus confirmed when her father died.

At her father's wake, Ana sees again the mysterious woman who fled her father's bedroom on the night of his death. The woman, Amelia, is the wife of her father's close friend and fellow military officer.

Ana's satisfaction of having rid herself of her father's presence is short-lived, for her mother's sister, her Aunt Paulina, soon arrives to set the house in order. The all-female household is completed by the children's grandmother, mute and waiting for death in a wheelchair, and the feisty, fleshy housekeeper, Rosa. Ana takes refuge in the basement, where she keeps her powder, and where she is watched by an apparition of herself from twenty years in the future. The adult Ana, looking exactly like her mother, recounts her infancy.

The little rituals of everyday life fill Ana's days during her summer vacation from school. Tortured by the memories of her mother's illness, Ana rebels against her aunt's authoritarian style, and in bouts of loneliness she variously imagines her mother's continued presence, or even her own suicide. Though diverted by the presence of her two sisters, Ana's only truly close companions are the family maid, Rosa, and her pet guinea pig, Roni, whom she discovers dead in his cage one morning.

Ana's mother's painful death from cancer, her father's presumed murder, her guinea pig's death and her own imagined suicide weigh on the girl's mind. Ana even offers her grandmother the opportunity of dying and ridding herself from loneliness by providing her a spoonful of the poison. The old woman turns down Ana's offer and realizes that the powder is simply baking soda.

The adult Ana explains child Ana's obsession with the powder: her mother once told her that it was a poison, so strong that one spoonful would kill an elephant. Adult Ana further explains her motivation in wanting to kill her father: "The only thing I remembered perfectly is that then my father seemed responsible for the sadness that weighed on my mother in the last years of her life. I was convinced that he, and he alone, had provoked her illness."

In a flashback, we see child Ana watching her parents on an occasion when her father came home late. Her mother pleas him to open up to her, to love her. He coldly accuses her of causing him grief to which she responds by crying out that she’s sickly and desires death, which he again discards as an attempt to change his behavior.

Ana attempts to poison her aunt with the same powder. She repeats the preparation of milk with the substance, but awakens the next morning for the first day of school to find that Paulina is still alive. Ana and her two sisters leave the stifling family compound after one, Irene, tells her a vision from a dream she had of being put at the stake, "...y cuando me iban a matar, me desperté." They march into the vibrant and noisy city, which they have been all but shut out from. The film ends with girls in black uniforms going to classes and then an aerial vision of Castilian and Aragonese Madrid.

Ana Torrent plays the lead character, Ana. She was already well known thanks to her starring role in the film El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) (1973) by Víctor Erice, made when she was seven years old. She followed Cría Cuervos with yet another memorable role in The Nest (1980) in which she played a thirteen-year-old in a relationship with an aging widower played by Héctor Alterio who here has the role of Anselmo, Ana's father.

Geraldine Chaplin plays dual roles: Ana's mother, Maria, in which she speaks Spanish with an English accent and Ana as a young woman in which she is dubbed by actress Julieta Serrano. Chaplin was director Saura's common-law wife and muse at that time. She appeared in ten of his films.[2]

• Ana Torrent as Ana, 8 years old
• Conchi Pérez as Irene, 11 years old
• Maite Sánchez as Maite, 5 years old
• Geraldine Chaplin as Ana's mother (Maria) and older Ana
• Mónica Randall as Aunt Paulina
• Florinda Chico as Rosa, a maid
• Josefina Díaz as Ana's grandmother
• Héctor Alterio as Anselmo, Ana's father
• Mirta Miller as Amelia, Anselmo's mistress
• Germán Cobos as Nicholas, Amelia's husband

The title Cría Cuervos comes from the Spanish proverb, "Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos". This translates as, "Raise ravens, and they'll gouge your eyes out" and is generally used for someone who has bad luck in raising children, or raising them badly. It may also imply rebellious behavior or that every bad act will return to haunt you.

The phrase "Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos" is said to originate with Don Álvaro de Luna of Castile during a hunting expedition. In the course of the hunt his party came across a beggar with terrible scarring in the place of eyes. The beggar explained that he had raised a raven for three years with affection and great care, but it attacked him one day, leaving him blind. The bon mot was Don Álvaro's reply.[3]

Cría Cuervos was originally released as Cría! in the United States and as Raise Ravens in the UK, but the original title Cría Cuervos is now used in both countries.

This film was made during a period where Carlos Saura was considered one of the great opponents, along with other directors, of the Francoist Spain, with characters and themes in the film alluding to Saura's interpretations and criticisms of Franco-inspired truths.

The film stresses the disparity between Ana's inner world of private traumas and the outer world of political realities and the Francoist State. Ana will cope with her guilt in both arenas.

When asked to elucidate the nature of Ana's suffering, the director replied: "Cría Cuervos is a sad film, yes. But that's part of my belief that childhood is one of the most terrible parts in the life of a human being. What I'm trying to say is that at that age you've no idea where it is you are going, only that people are taking you somewhere, leading you, pulling you and you are frightened. You don't know where you're going or who you are or what you are going to do. It's a time of terrible indecision."[4]

Cría Cuervos was shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish leader Francisco Franco lay dying, and premiered in Madrid's Conde Duque Theatre, on January 26, 1976.[5] Highly acclaimed, it received the Cannes film festival Special Jury Prize Award. The film became director Carlos Saura and producer Elías Querejeta's most commercially successful film up to that point, going on to become the sixth largest grossing Spanish film of 1976.[6] The picture made a similar strong showing in foreign markets, including the United States where it solidified Saura's reputation as Spain's best internationally-known director of the 1970s.[6] Today the film is considered a political and psychological masterpiece and a classic of Spanish Cinema.[5] The film was selected as the Spanish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 49th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.[7] It was, however, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film by the U.S. National Board of Review.[8]

The film prominently features the pop song "Porque te vas" by Jeanette, an English-born singer, singing in Spanish, whose accented voice reminds Ana of her mother, as played by Geraldine Chaplin, who speaks Spanish with her English-accented voice. Despite an infectious rhythm the song has sad and poignant lyrics. The song expresses the fact that Ana has no understanding of death, only of absence.[9]

Cría Cuervos was released on DVD on August 14, 2007 in a two-disc special edition as part of the Criterion Collection.

The film was released on Blu-ray in a Dual Format Edition on May 27, 2013 by the BFI.

• List of submissions to the 49th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of Spanish submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

• Cría Cuervos on IMDb
• Cría Cuervos at Rotten Tomatoes
• Cría Cuervos at AllMovie
• Cría cuervos . . . : The Past Is Not Past an essay by Paul Julian Smith at the Criterion Collection
• Film Reference
• Strictly Film School
• DVDLaser.com
• Film Affinity (Spanish)
• Cinergia (Spanish)