General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Amanece, que no es poco

Amanece, que no es poco is a 1988 Spanish surrealist comedy feature film written, directed, and produced by José Luis Cuerda, released in Spanish cinemas on 17 January 1989. It follows Teodoro, a Spanish engineer teaching at the University of Oklahoma who returns to Spain on sabbatical, and his father, who arrives on a motorcycle with sidecar at a remote mountain village where the priest celebrates mass as a spectacle and the residents hold annual elections for mayor, priest, teacher, and the village prostitute. Initially poorly received by critics, it has become one of the most prominent cult films of Spanish cinema.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and screenwriter	José Luis Cuerda (Albacete, 1947), who also devised the plot¹
Production and release	Produced in 1988; Spanish theatrical release 17 January 1989; 35 mm, Agfacolor¹^•⁴
Runtime	106 minutes in commercial halls; 110 minutes in the video version⁴
Spanish box office	623,644.81 € gross and 309,319 admissions¹
Goya nominations	Three at the 4th Goya Awards: Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound, and Best Special Effects²
Filming locations	Ayna, Liétor, and Molinicos, in the Sierra del Segura of Albacete province⁵
Retrospective recognition	Voted best Spanish film of the last 60 years in a 2013 Seminci de Valladolid audience poll; 15th best comedy of all time in a Cinemanía ranking⁶

Spoilers

Plot and style

Teodoro, a young Spanish engineer and professor at the University of Oklahoma, returns to Spain for a sabbatical year. His father, who has killed his mother, has bought a motorcycle with sidecar for pleasure trips the two can take together, and they arrive at a hidden mountain village that appears deserted. The explanation is that all the neighbors except Nge Ndomo are at mass, because the priest handles the liturgy with such skill that no parishioner wants to miss the show.²

The village holds annual democratic elections to decide who will serve during the coming year as mayor, priest, teacher, and prostitute. Visitors accumulate: a group of American students from the University of Eaton, Belgian meteorologists, and dissidents from the army choir. Other absurdities include men who grow like plants under the cabbages.⁷^•³ The film presents a rural, apparently enlightened society whose laws of nature themselves do not match reality, an effect one academic study compares to Renaissance utopias such as Tomás Moro's Utopía and Tommaso Campanella's La città del Sole, with the difference that in the film even natural law is arbitrary.⁸

Cuerda himself joked that his humor moved from surrealism to surruralism, a fusion of the surreal with the rural. The film forms a loose trilogy of this style with the television film Total (1983) and Así en el cielo como en la tierra (1995), and he returned to it in his last feature, Tiempo después (2018).⁶^•³

Origin

The film began as television. After Total (1983), Televisión Española proposed a series on similar lines; Cuerda's project went through an unworkable draft called Ab urbe condita, and in 1984 he wrote five one-hour scripts under the title Amanece, que no es poco, which TVE declined to produce. The scripts were later found in a filing cabinet at his home and published in 2014 as the book Amanece, que no es poco (La serie). To turn them into a film, Cuerda did the same kind of work as in a novel adaptation, keeping what was most useful for the new story; he said that practically the whole film was already in those scripts.⁶

Cast and production

Cuerda assembled a large ensemble of established Spanish comic actors, with a cast listed at up to 38 performers that Luis García Berlanga called "the best cast in the history of Spanish cinema."⁹ The credited cast includes Antonio Resines, Luis Ciges, José Sazatornil "Saza", Casto Sendra "Cassen", Pastora Vega, Ovidi Montllor, Chus Lampreave, Manuel Alexandre, María Isbert, Miguel Rellán, Guillermo Montesinos, Rafael Alonso, Carmen de Lirio, Queta Claver, Antonio Gamero, Aurora Bautista, Enrique San Francisco, Fedra Lorente, Violeta Cela, and Gabino Diego, among others.¹^•⁴

The film was shot in the summer of 1988 in Ayna, Liétor, and Molinicos, three small villages in the Sierra del Segura in Albacete province, and was Cuerda's first feature filmed in his native region.⁵^•¹⁰ It was produced by Compañía de Aventuras Comerciales (C.A.C), with cinematography by Porfirio Enríquez, editing by Juan Ignacio San Mateo, and a score by José Nieto that also incorporates pieces by Giovanni Gastoldi, Puccini, and Handel.²^•⁴ It received a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and the collaboration of Caja de Albacete.⁴

Reception and cult status

At release the film left critics and audiences disoriented, and it was poorly received critically; its humor, far from the comedy then prevailing in Spain, did not fit expectations.³^•¹¹ Its Spanish theatrical run drew 309,319 admissions and 623,644.81 € in gross.¹ It received three Goya nominations at the 4th edition of the awards: Best Original Screenplay for Cuerda, Best Sound for Carlos Faruolo and Enrique Molinero, and Best Special Effects for Reyes Abades.²

Retrospective standing. Over the following decades the film accumulated a following that Cuerda said he could not explain. In 2013, as the Seminci de Valladolid approached its 60th edition, its audience and social networks chose Amanece, que no es poco as the best Spanish film of the last sixty years, and the magazine Cinemanía ranked it 15th among the best comedies of all time, ahead of Berlanga's El verdugo in 22nd place.⁶ A 2025 El País survey of the 50 best Spanish films of the last half century included it among the classics that point the way for current creators.¹²

The fan community calls itself the amanecistas, described as the largest fan legion in Spanish cinema, and members gather periodically to revisit the shoot and the film's best-known lines.³^•¹³ Film tourism developed around the shooting locations, known as the "ruta amanecista," and Ayna houses a Centro de Interpretación dedicated to the film, displaying locations, objects, photographs, and anecdotes from the shoot.¹⁴^•¹⁵ At a 25th-anniversary screening at the Callao cinemas in Madrid, Antonio Resines counted some forty laughs and twenty-odd rounds of applause, a figure Cuerda offered as evidence of the film's comic durability.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Satirical, black, and parody comedies of the 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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