Living is Easy with Eyes Closed at EUFF

David Trueba’s Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados will represent Spain at The European Union Film Festival in Quebec.

The European Union Film Festival arrives for the first time in Quebec City to show the best of contemporary cinema produced in the European Union. Each country has carte blanche to choose the film that will represent them. Together, their exciting selections make for a lively, provocative, stimulating, and entertaining state-of-the-Union celebration of the diversity, dynamism, and accomplishment of contemporary European filmmaking.

Living is easy with eyes closed

• Directed by David Trueba, Spain, 2013, 108 minutes.
• With Javier Cámara, Natalia de Molina, Francesc Colomer.
• Winner of 6 Goya Awards in 2014.
• In Spanish with French subtitles.
• Watch trailer.

Beatles fans will recognize the title; the words stem from the Beatles song Strawberry Fields Forever. John Lennon wrote it in 1966, while in southern Spain playing a minor character in Richard Lester’s anti-war movie How I Won the War. This forms the backdrop of Trueba’s film about Antonio, a Spanish schoolteacher who is also an avid Beatles-fan. When he learns that Lennon is filming in Almeria, he sets out to meet him. Along the way he makes friends with Belen, a twenty-year-old girl pregnant girl who is on her way home to her family, and Juanjo, a teenage boy. Lennon’s words take on special significance in a story set in Franco’s Spain.

Living is easy with eyes closed is a charming roadmovie that manages to convey both the carefree attitude of the period as well as its darker undertone.