The story of how Picasso painted Guernica is the focus in ‘Minotauro’, the new film by Julio Medem

Director Julio Medem returns to the big screen this year with ‘MINOTAURO. Picasso and the women of Guernica’, a film about the life of Picasso in the spring of 1937 that will focus on the creation of one of his most famous works: Guernica. According to Medem, the whole world receives this influential painting “as a cry against the civil war in Spain, so overwhelming that it extends to all the wars of Humanity”, but the story of the man behind the brush helps us to understand much more. about its meaning.

This project was born with the Spanish producer Eusebio Pacha, who I had been working with Carlos Saura for three years to bring this story to the screen. However, Saura, who died last February at the age of 91, did not see himself with the strength to lead a shoot of this magnitude. At the end of June 2022, the relay passed to Julio Medem, who was given the freedom to start with a clean slate: write a new script and shoot a film about the creation of Guernica according to his own rules. And so ‘MINOTAURO’ was born.

The film will address Picasso’s emotional, artistic and political situation in the spring of 1937, during his stay in Paris, at a time when he was dealing with complicated sexual-affective relationships with three women and Spain was suffering its first year of Civil War. In that context, The Government of the Spanish Republic commissioned him a painting for the International Exhibition in Paris, and his work would become the most influential painting of the 20th century, Guernica..

‘MINOTAURO’ stars Pablo Derqui as Pablo Picasso, and the three actresses who give life to their lovers: Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey as Dora Maar, a surrealist photographer; Catalina Sopelana as Marie-Thèrése Walter, Picasso’s model and mother of his daughter Maya; and Ailyn Prandi as Olga Koklova, a Russian aristocrat, model, and Picasso’s wife. The cast also includes Enrique Arce (‘La casa de papel’). The photography direction is by Israel Cárdenas, the production design is by Montse Sanz, and the music will be composed by Jocelyn Pook.

“‘MINOTAURO, Picasso and the women of Guernica’ is a complex story full of layers,” explains the director in a statement, where he expands on more details of the story. “Part of the mind of a child, Picasso at the age of 8, who in the bullring of Malaga he sees a bull brutally straddle a horse, which screams in pain, and his tender gaze convulsed until forty years later when the MINOTAUR appears in his painting, that mythological figure, half man, half animal, who is the core of this story” .

The director continues: “Because of the powerful pull of this depiction of male bestiality emerges the ultimate dramatic substance of the story; Picasso’s relationship with three women so different that they create a three-sided portrait of his personality“.

Spanish-Dominican co-production, produced by the Spanish Eusebio Pacha of Pipa Films and the Dominican Gabriel Tineo of Batú Films, together with the General Directorate of Cinema of the Dominican Ministry of Culture, ‘MINOTAURO’ was shot at the end of 2022 at the English Pinewood studios from the Dominican Republic. We will be able to see it through festivals and finally in movie theaters next fall.