The Russians are coming!

Alta Films and the Spanish discovery of Soviet films in the late Cold War years (1969-1993)

Abstract

The revamping of the Spanish distribution company Alta Films after the end of the Franco regime in 1975 challenges some of the prevailing narratives about film cultural circulation in the late decades of the Cold War. From a territory whose own existence was deeply intertwined in the geopolitics of that time (Franco’s dictatorship built over decades its international position on its anticommunism), and which has been usually considered peripheral in film historical terms, Enrique González Macho’s company was key in the Spanish discovery of those films which had been previously banned for more than four decades from the national screens. At the same time, Alta’s transactions with Sovexportfilm also made possible the successful export of Spanish productions to the Soviet Union during the 1980s.
This essay looks at the evolution of these arrangements over a period of more than ten years which culminates in the establishment of Alsov, a company co-owned by Alta Films and Sovexportfilms. Although this enterprise ended abruptly, the activities of Alta Film brought together two countries usually quite distant in film historical terms and involved in a-synchronic processes of political transformation.