Live News From Spain As It Happens

SPAIN'S answer to the Oscars, the Goya Awards will have had much of the nation glued to their TV sets last night (Saturday) and offered the rest of the world a taster of what the Spanish cinema industry is capable of. In the Anglo-Saxon world, viewers in general know little about films not produced in English – given that these continue to dominate the planet and it is extremely rare to hear of a movie dubbed into the language – meaning those in any other language tend to be found uniquely in art-house film theatres, subtitled, and cater for a very niche market.

But Spain's most famous modern director Pedro Almódovar has successfully exported his productions to the UK, and actors who started out in his films and continue to star in them regularly – such as Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas – have also managed to conquer Hollywood; the former only in the last 18 years, when she made her English-language début alongside Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, an adaptation of Alejandro Amenábar's Abre los Ojos ('Open Your Eyes').

And Amenábar, too, has made his name among Anglo-Saxon mainstream film fans through The Others, starring Nicole Kidman.

So, even if you have to watch Spanish films with subtitles in English – perhaps graduating onto subtitles in Spanish eventually, with a view to dropping these altogether one day – anyone who plans to live or holiday regularly in the country should do their cinema homework; you never know who or what might pop up one day on UK and US screens.

Read more at thinkSPAIN.com