Vampir-Cuadecuc / Umbracle Blu-ray presents the North American Blu-ray premieres of two of Pere Portabella’s most radical and influential cinematic works, finally scanned in HD from the director’s own vault elements. A pioneering Spanish filmmaker and political figure, Portabella reshaped the boundaries of narrative and genre cinema with films that blur documentary, abstraction, and political subversion. Invited by Jess Franco to shoot a behind-the-scenes documentary on Count Dracula, Portabella instead created Vampir-Cuadecuc, a hypnotic, near-silent deconstruction of Dracula mythology and the mechanics of filmmaking itself, featuring Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, and Soledad Miranda in strikingly unfamiliar form. Its companion film, Umbracle, is an unsettling and fragmented meditation on fear, violence, and memory, anchored by an unusually candid appearance from Lee. Together, Vampir-Cuadecuc / Umbracle Blu-ray captures Portabella’s singular vision and stands as a cornerstone of avant-garde European cinema.
 
directed by: Pere Portabella
starring: Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Soledad Miranda
1971 / 157 min