Countries & Movies: Spain
The best Spanish film, according to FilmGourmand, was recognized film "Mar adentro (The Sea Inside)" by Alejandro Amenábar. The premiere of the film took place in Madrid on September 2, 2004.
The film was awarded 68 film awards, including the most prestigious, such as the American Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Italian David di Donatello Award for Best European Film, the European Film Award and the Venice Film Festival Special Grand Prix for best directing. It goes without saying that in his homeland the film received 14 Goya awards, including the most important ones, as Best Film and Best Director. And this terribly offended Pedro Almodovar whose film "La mala educación (Bad Education)" was also nominated in 4 categories, but did not win in any. Pedro, along with his brother-producer Agustín, in protest, left the Spanish Film Academy.
The film was also nominated for the French César Award as Best Foreign Film, but lost to ’s American film "Million Dollar Baby" by Clint Eastwood.
It is curious that the lead actor in the film, Javier Bardem, received 11 nominations for the best male lead in various film festivals and won 9 of them, but did not receive an Oscar nomination. Either the American film academics decided that nine awards were enough, or did not want to create competition for the black actor Jamie Foxx, who played the title role in the film Ray. The famous Russian film critic Sergey Kudryavtsev commented on this fact as follows: "The American Film Academy doubly offended Javier Bardem, for some reason not nominating for an Oscar for his role, but at the same time nominating Joe Allen and Manolo Garcia for a make-up artist."
The film showed good financial results, raising more than 43 million dollars with a budget of 10 million euros.
As for the film critics’ rating, Roger Ebert, who rated the film with three out of four possible stars, probably gave the most generalized rating. With a fairly large number of laudatory reviews, you can also find such as, for example, the review of The New York Times columnist Stephen Holden, who wrote: "To its credit, the movie avoids becoming a formulaic dialogue that pits religious and secular cheerleaders against one another in predigested arguments. Even so, the characters (some of them composites) often feel like schematic formulations intended to balance the story. And the deepest philosophical questions posed by euthanasia are only glancingly addressed, most often in Ramón's bitterly ironic remarks. The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book "Letters From Hell.""
However, the rating given to the film by simple moviegoers significantly exceeds the rating given by film critics. 82% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave the film a rating of 8 to 10.
Taking into account the above indicators of the film’s success, its rating according to the version of FilmGourmand was 10.926, and in the Golden Thousand it took 14th place.
In addition to the film "The Sea Inside" the Golden Thousand included 13 more Spanish films, a list of which can be found here.
