Leonora Carrington and the Surrealist Game

Javier Martín-Domínguez is the director of "Leonora Carrington and the Surrealist Game", a documentary that opens at the Renoir cinemas in Madrid this Friday, which looks at the life of the painter and writer Leonora Carrington, the last survivor of the surrealist movement.

This documentary tells the odyssey of her passionate life. The film shows the struggle of a woman to be free and explore her unconscious, to the point of being admitted to a Spanish psychiatric hospital in the 1940s.

The daughter of one of the richest men in 1930s England, the wealthy British textile manufacturer Harold Wylde Carrington, Leonora was the youngest of four children, grew up in a wealthy Catholic family, and grew up playing with her brothers Patrick, Gerald and Arthur in a Victorian Gothic-style mansion where her imagination ran wild (as she would later explain: "I always had access to other worlds"). 

She was a rebellious teenager who was expelled from a number of elite schools. And she showed signs of an overflowing imagination, even claiming that many spirits coexisted in her and that she had the soul of a gypsy.

Leonora Carrington rebelled against a repressive and sexist education, running away to Paris with the most renowned painter of the time, the German Max Ernst, who was twice her age. They indulged their artistic and amorous passion in a small village in the south of France, until the Nazi invasion shattered their happiness. Ernst was interned in a concentration camp and Leonora escaped to Spain, where the Civil War had recently ended. She was in a mental hospital in Santander, from which she left for Lisbon, where she married the Mexican diplomat and poet Renato Leduc. After emigrating to New York and Mexico, she remarried the Hungarian Jewish photographer Chiki Weisz, Robert Capa's assistant and the man who saved the negatives of the author's "famous Mexican suitcase", which were recently recovered. A great inspiration for the Latin American artistic avant-garde, Leonora died in 2011 at the age of 94, leaving behind an extensive legacy as a painter and writer.

Throughout 76 minutes of footage, Javier Martín-Domínguez offers the experience of this painter and writer, as the last great representative of surrealism, who tells the story of a woman's odyssey to be free in difficult and convulsive times.

Leonora Carrington had a reputation for being enigmatic, and it was not in vain that she said: "I am as mysterious to myself as I am to others". She was unpredictable and curious, which is demonstrated by the fact that she was born in a very traditional England and ended up becoming the last survivor of the surrealist movement.

The director of this documentary, Javier Martín-Domínguez, has had an extensive career in journalism, film and television. He is a member of the European Film Academy, EFA, and was director of the Seville Film Festival from 2008 to 2011.

His documentary film on the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington was selected for the Guadalajara (Mexico), Sitges and Malaga festivals. He has directed and produced numerous documentaries. 

He has been a jury member at several international festivals, including Moscow, Sarajevo and Documenta Madrid. He has worked in Spanish public television, TVE, as general secretary, director of development and thematic channels. He was correspondent in Washington and New York for radio and television, and correspondent in Tokyo for La Vanguardia de Barcelona. He was also editor-in-chief of the magazine Comunicación XXI and currently chairs the International Press Club and is a contributor to Atalayar.