Vida en sombras is an exception in the context of Spanish film. It doesn’t follow the lines of most “official” Spanish films of the 1940s. It’s a product of desire, not at all a commercial enterprise. Perhaps for that reason it suffered from the economic censorship which film professionals imposed on many projects at that time. Lorenzo Llobet Gràcia’s lack of interest in commercial films derives in part from the fact that he came from the Spanish amateur cinema. Vida en sombras presents Llobet’s attitude toward the cinema. It takes some personal aspects from his own life (the death of his father during the civil war transformed in the film into the death of the wife) and Llobet made the film turn around the relationship between life and cinema. Vida en sombras premiered in 1953, five years after it was shot, with no publicity, in a double-bill in a down-town cinema. Nobody saw it at all. The negative has been lost and only two 16mm copies remain. Though damaged they have been used for an approximate reconstruction of the original film.

Ferrán Alberich