Francisco Rovira Beleta (Barcelona 1913-1999), despite his fecund and notorious career, is only now being fully recognized as director of merit today. Los Tarantos (1963), a unique and imperishable gypsy drama, constitutes, together with El amor brujo (1967), his most acclaimed work. Both movies made Rovira Beleta the first Spanish director to have two films nominated to the Academy Awards.

In Spain gypsies have traditionally been stigmatized as second-class citizens. Equally feared and despised, mythified and vilified, gypsies, particularly during Francoism, became figures of an absurd romanticism and added picturesque "real" local flavour to tourist pamphlets in an era where foreign visitors brought tourist dollars to the impoverished country. Flamenco, the gypsies' art, was also utilised as stereotyped entertainment for a gloomy and frustrated society, and occasional escape for members of the Spanish bourgeoisie keen to escape their monotonous lives by taking refuge in the bizarre and seductive underground world of the tablaos. This perception had its counterpart in cinema. In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and the years of the autarky in the decade of the 1950s, both gypsies and their art became regular stereotypes in sweetened-often despicable-filmic artifacts designed to make audiences dream and forget. Like Edgar Neville's Misterio y duende del flamenco (1953), Rovira Beleta challenged forever the stereotyped adulterations and romanticized topics of the "gypsy flick". A climax of filmic poetic realism, Los Tarantos pursued a realistic and vivid depiction of the depths of the gypsy soul, within the "unrealistic" generic frame of the musical drama. Following a Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet narrative, Rovira Beleta constructed a magnificent gypsy West Side Story. With documentary sensibility, the director entered the shantytown of Somorrostro, near Barcelona. The camera became a social and ethnological instrument, a daring witness that challenged censors by depicting both a world of misery, social inequalities and class conflict, and also a society in which the seed of youth rebellion was starting to bloom within the suffocating atmosphere of Francoism. Nevertheless, Rovira Beleta's will to reflect the reality of the gypsy did not entail neglecting the artistic and commercial side of the project. Flamenco choreographies, splendidly stylised under the influence of American musicals, convey with newly found honesty the depths of the gypsy art. Carmen Amaya, the legendary flamenco dancer who died shortly after filming, creates some unforgivable mythic scenes with her magnetic and telluric movements. A very young Antonio Gades represents the more contemporary counterpart. Los Tarantos constitutes a subversive vindication of a race, and a faithful and honest reflection of its beauty, liberty and dignity.

Ramon Lopez Castellano