Film Factory Ent. – a sales agent on “Wild Tales,” “The Clan,” “Close Your Eyes” and “The Kings of the World” – has boarded “Jokes & Cigarettes” (“Saben Aquell”), the latest movie from Spain’s David Trueba which is fast-emerging as one of Spain’s late year Goya Award contenders after a San Sebastian sneak-peek and the bow of a trailer.
“Jokes & Cigarettes” joins a Film Factory sales lineup which has included, of titles at this week’s MIA Spanish Screenings on Tour, Javier Macipe’s breakout “The Blue Star,” a hit at San Sebastian where it won the TCM Youth Award and Spanish Co-operation Award.
Trueba, also a novelist, journalist and documentarian, has directed four fiction films and four documentaries since “Living is Easy With Eyes Closed,” which swept seven Goyas in 2014 including picture, director, original screenplay, actor (Fernando Cámara and actress (Natalia de Molina).
Released in Spain on Nov. 1 by Warner Bros. Pictures, “Jokes & Cigarettes” marks his biggest feature in terms of industry support since “Living,” being backed by Movistar Plus+, HBO Max, TV3 and ICEC.
Produced by Edmón Roch’s Ikiru Films (“The Communion Girl”), Atresmedia Cine (“Mummies”) and La Terraza Films, the true facts-based “Jokes & Cigarettes” stars David Verdaguer (“Summer 1993”) as an icon and a paradox: Barcelona’s Eugenio, a comedian who told jokes with a deadpan delivery, grave voice and genius at comic timing, always introduced by the phrase “Saben aquel que diu.”
He did so perched on a high stool, dressed all in black, wearing glazed glasses, a high balls glass of vodka and orange on a table to one side, enveloped by plumes of smoke from a Ducados black tobacco cigarette in hand. From a trailer, Verdaguer gets that off pat.
That was his public figure, invented with the love of his life, wife Conchita Alcaide (Carolina Yuste, “Carmen & Lola,” “Nights in Tefía”), with whom he started off in 1965 as a singing duo. But his figure, as the film suggests, was a character.
Dependent on immediate audience reaction, every few seconds, stand up comedians can be forgiven for insecurity. None more so than Eugenio.
His imperturbability and the whorling cigarette smoke are pictured in “Jokes” as a form of defence, hiding a man whose lifelong emotional frailty which was compounded by depression and an incontrovertibly monumental tragic loss in 1980 which overshadowed the rest of his relatively short life.
“This is a film about humor and survival,” Trueba has said.
“Eugenio was responsible for making a whole country laugh. But what did he hide inside?” he asks.
“We are pleased to join David Trueba’s new project, a great filmmaker on the Spanish overview, with the stellar performance of David Verdaguer as the emblematic and characteristic comedian of Spanish history,” said Vicente Canales, director of Film Factory, which will be in charge of the film’s international sales.
Focusing on the makings of Eugenio, in his rise to fame from the late ‘60s to the ‘70s when he knew joy with Alcaide and Spain is racing helter-skelter to democracy, “Jokes & Cigarettes” is written by Trueba and Albert Espinosa (“Polseres vermelles,” “Live is Life”). It is based on Espinosa’s adaptationsof “Eugenio” y “Saben aquell que diu,” non-fiction books written by Eugenio and Conchita Alcaide’s son Gerard Jofra. Roch and Jaime Ortiz de Artiñano produce.
