In the harsh post-war years' Catalan countryside, Andreu, a child that belongs to the losing side, finds the corpses of a man and his son in the forest. The authorities want his father to be made responsible of the deaths, but Andreu tries to help his father by finding out who truly killed them. In this search, Andreu develops a moral consciousness against a world of adults fed by lies. In order to survive, he betrays his own roots and ends up finding out the monster that lives within him.
A different story in the after times of the Spanish Civil War.
Cleverly, it mixes a thriller with the destruction of the naïve childhood of the main character.
Who is good and who is bad, who is true and who lies is unclear as the events that lead to the current situation. A must to see in nowadays Spanish film making.
Agustí Villaronga's "Pa Negre" (Black Bread) belongs to a vital tradition of Spanish cinema that uses a child's perspective to reveal how fascism poisons communities from within. Like Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" and especially Víctor Erice's "El Sur" (1983), this film understands that childhood under fascism means the premature death of innocence. Young Andreu doesn't just grow up; he's forced to witness the moral rot beneath the surface of his post-Civil War Catalan village.
The film operates on dual registers. On one level, it's a mystery structured like an elaborate game of Clue, with Andreu piecing together who did what and why in the aftermath of a father and son's death. On another, darker level, it's an unflinching exam...
