Cria Cuervos (1977)

"...an indelible, serenely hypnotic, and deeply affecting portrait of innocence, death, and grief...  Strictly Film School
"A movie of marvelous moments and superb performances.  The New York Times

Editor's Note After doing several films with screenwriter Rafael Azcona (GARDEN OF DELIGHTS, MY COUSIN AGNELICA) Carlos Saura made CRIA! from his own script. He continued using actors in dual roles, allowing for easily shifting time frames and multiple points of view. In a dreamy opening scene, Ana (Ana Torrent), a wide-eyed child of about ten, comes down the stairs and sees a half-dressed woman run from her father's room. She quietly and without emotion goes into the room where her father lies dead on the bed and removes a half-full glass of milk. In the kitchen, as she washes out the glass, her mother (Geraldine Chaplin) enters and scolds her for being up so late. But her Mother, we learn later, died earlier, and Ana blamed her father for it and put poison in his milk. When Ana is alone her mother appears to her again, but this time she looks right in the camera and explains that she's Ana, now age 29. Some of what came before was a flashback from her adult perspective. With Chaplin playing both parts, the film shifts between the story of Ana and her mother, and Ana's life as an adult, until what actually happened the night her father died is completely revealed. CRIA! is the most complex and ambitious of the many films that Saura and Chaplin made together.

	Ana Torrent
	Florinda Chico
	Geraldine Chaplin
	Monica Randall
	Carlos Saura - Director
	Carlos Saura - Writer
	Carlos Saura - Producer
	Federico Mompou - Original Music By
	Pablo Gonzalez del Amo - Editor
	Rafael Palmero - Production Designer
	Teodoro Escamilla - Cinematographer

New York Times
"...Beautifully acted, haunting....A movie of marvelous moments and two superb performances..." 05/19/1977 p.C20

Sight and Sound
"One of the most important films in Saura's long career, CRIA CUERVOS powerfully conjures the commingling of past and present, fantasy and memory." 12/01/2007 p.105

Total Film
4 stars out of 5 -- "A richly shot, impressively acted film containing a powerful, bleak vision of both childhood and a repressive adult world." 06/01/2011

Strictly Film School 8 of 10
Carlos Saura presents an indelible, serenely hypnotic, and deeply affecting portrait of innocence, death, and grief in "Cria Cuervos". The title of the film refers to a Spanish proverb, "Raise ravens, and they will pluck out your eyes", and alludes to the children's irrational compulsion for vengeance and self-destruction: Ana's innate wish for her father's death; her fascination with a mysterious jar discarded by her mother; the children's resurrection prayer after playing hide-and-seek; Irene's kidnapping nightmare. By juxtaposing low angle medium shots that represent the children's perspective with fluid crane shots that reflect a birdseye point view, Saura visually emphasizes the incongruous union of the children's naivete with an ominous sense of instinctive cruelty. Inevitably, the fusion of haunted past and indeterminate present, like the coexistence of innocuous wish and intentional malice, becomes the tragic and unresolved legacy of a lost and misguided childhood.