Mientras el cuerpo aguante

Mientras el cuerpo aguante, Fernado Trueba, Spain, 1982, 89’ VO with spanish subtitles

+ Live music concert: Las Hojas de Albacete supergroup (Ciclos Iturgaiz, Mursego and Elurretan) sings Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio

This is one of those films about a time when musicians travelled by train, guitar in hand. When they used to go touring the ‘provinces’. When they used to sing on the streets and restaurant terraces. Days of Bohemia. Of political chants and affiliation. A documentary portrait of a unique time and a unique figure – Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio, poet, mathematician, inventor, singer, reader and musician. “When I start singing / I don’t bid anyone’s leave”, he says in a one of the verses.

And without bidding anyone’s leave, talking to camera, talking and singing, we discover the life and work of this street singer (as he is listed in the final credits): his Marxist-Leninist activism, his trip to Albania, the prisons, the relationship between lentils and marihuana, the miners’ strikes in Asturias and his coplas as a way of saying things no one else dared to voice. If Jaime Chavarri’s El Desencanto (1976) served as a portrait of the end of the dictatorship, perhaps this second film by Fernando Trueba contains the keys to what is called the Transition.

But above all of this history with a capital H is Chicho, a genius and a character. And song, which is what you live.