“The ‘Ars vivendi’ of Laura Mañà’s Morir en San Hilario/To Die in San Hilario (2005)”

Abstract

Over the past decade Spanish-Language Cinema has established itself beside Spanish and Latin American Cinema, and Morir en San Hilario is a good example of these new flexible collaborations rather than a strict transnational co-production. Billed as a comedy, the film could also be described as a variation on the road film, a circular journey to Utopia, a Spanish village/pueblo film, and a twenty-first-century ‘Ars moriendi’ developing the topos of ‘Homo viator’. This is not a frequent combination to be found on cinema screens and Laura Mañà’s gamble was to integrate these ingredients and create a fable to reflect on life and death. She does this through comedy, exaggerations, parody and a narrative style identified as magic realism. Her originality, however, overlaps with the lasting legacy of the fifteenth-century Castilian soldier-poet, Jorge Manrique (c.1440-1479) and his ‘Stanzas written upon the death of his father’, a landmark of Spanish Literature.