"An experiment of almost mythical proportions (...) the characters overthrow any attempt at direction, creating their own characters, which in turn take control of the film."

"The viewer is presented with all the complexity of the film's psychology. It's like an open wound through which you can glimpse the disillusion of a Spain under Franco's regime."

"The rawness of their statements strips their spirits. The confrontation within the Panero family nucleus exposes their pitiful miseries and provokes a catharsis from the audience. The film callously shows the family enclosed in intimate and delightful pain."

"Within this dense material, poetic by its nature, and with the heavyweight expression of its characters, Chavarri's merit is his own capability to organise such valuable and chaotic content. And he wisely accompanies it with the first part of Shubert's Sonata 959, whose aching chords play back, reaffirming how boring happiness could have been."

Por María Villalva
MIRADAS DE CINE

"Intense docudrama filled with reflections about the family institution. The woman and children of poet Leopoldo Panero reveal their experiences in this bitter and funny oddity of Spanish cinema. Different."

EL PAÍS

"El Desencanto is one the key films of Spanish cinema in the last few years. The kind any proud cinematographer needs at some point of their existence".

"The actors of this classical and unique movie (Felicidad, Juan Luis, Leopoldo María o Mitzi) tune in with our own miseries, grievances and affirmations. There lies the grandeur of El Desencanto."

"Chavarri's movie goes beyond the personal psycho-drama to become a collective portrait of a tactile reality. A past of 40 years and an uncertain, devious present that is naturally disenchanted."

"Not a very conventional proposal, it requires an active and engaged audience."

J. Battle Caminal
EL PAÍS

"An optimistic allegory of what was yet to come.  If Franco's own followers rebelled against their source of life, what other choice did Spanish society have but to eliminate forever a dictatorship that had tormented them during 40 years."

"One of the riskiest and most courageous first steps of Spanish cinema."

Miguel Barrero
EL COMERCIO



"A ferocious x-ray of Francoist writer Panero's family (wife and three children). But it is also an overview of the Spain that ended one year before the movie was released. The day the super-general died."

"A masterpiece (...) one of the best films I have seen in my life."

EL AMANTE
GJC

"A veritable cult classic."

"Hailed as "the best creative documentary in Spanish cinematographic history" this is a beautiful portrait of a family and of post-Franco Spain trying to come to terms with its own history."

BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE