The last surrealist

“To tell my story as if it were natural is an imposture. Why don’t we play…? Shall we play Si c’était une fleur / if I were a flower…?”

This is how Leonora Carrington starts narrating her life, a real surrealist game.

Painter, sculptor, writer and we could also say escapist.

She was born in England in 1917, and being part of a well-off family, she escapes from class privileges. She moves to London. At her twenty-three years old, she meets Marx Ernst in Barcelona, escapes from London to France to live with him, flees from France before the arrival of the Nazis, goes to Spain where is hospitalized in a neuropsychiatric in Santander and writes “Memories from Bellow” based on that experience. She escapes from there to Lisbon, then to New York City and finally Mexico, where she stays and dies in 2011.

Of course, Leonora could be a flower and everything she would have imagined. Surrealism pioneer, she was not the first but is known as the last; one of the best well-kept secrets in Mexico and contemporary art.

A documentary starts with a game that allows narrating and deeping the living memory of a surrealist woman, her experiences, her creative process and her search for freedom from the unconscious.

Nine decades reported in ten days, condensed in an eighty-minute documentary, directed by Javier Martinez Domínguez, released next April 3rd at Cinema Boliche. Av. Diagonal, 508, Barcelona.

What are you going to do? Do we play?