Raise Ravens
Raise Ravens (Spanish: Cría cuervos) is a 1976 Spanish drama film directed by Carlos Saura about an eight-year-old girl, Ana, who lives with her sisters and aunt in Madrid after the deaths of her parents, and who believes she has the power over life and death. Filmed as General Francisco Franco was dying in the summer of 1975, the movie intertwines private life with politics, examining how fascism's legacy shaped an ordinary middle-class household.1 It won the Special Jury Prize at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival and is still considered one of Saura's greatest films.2
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director and writer | Carlos Saura, who wrote the screenplay alone, without his usual collaborator Rafael Azcona3 |
| Production | Spain, 1975–1976; producer Elías Querejeta; cinematography Teo Escamilla; editing Pablo G. del Amo1 |
| Premiere | Madrid, Conde Duque theater, 26 January 1976, two months after Franco's death4 • 5 |
| Award | Special Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival 19762 |
| Lead cast | Ana Torrent (Ana as a child), Geraldine Chaplin (Ana's mother and Ana as an adult), Mónica Randall (aunt Paulina), Héctor Alterio (the father Anselmo)1 |
| Spanish box office | 1,292,417 spectators and 581,496.11 in receipts4 |
| Music | Federico Mompou; also Jeanette's 1974 pop song "Porque te vas" and "Hay Mari Cruz" by Imperio Argentina1 |
Spoilers
Title and premise
The title comes from the Spanish proverb "Raise ravens and they'll pluck out your eyes", a phrase relating to those with bad luck in raising children.5 • 6 Ana (Ana Torrent) lives in a gloomy mansion in central Madrid with her two sisters, under the care of their strict aunt Paulina (Mónica Randall) after the death of their mother from a long illness and the death of their father, a senior army officer.7 • 8 Ana believes she has poisoned her authoritarian father, having secretly tipped powder from an old bicarbonate tin, which her mother had once whimsically called "poison", into his food.8
The line between reality, memory and fantasy is almost non-existent in Ana's world. To deal with the isolation and inflexibility of the grown-up world surrounding her, she again and again calls upon her deceased mother, as if the woman were still there.7 The film shifts between past, present and future, and its narrative chronology is deliberately ambiguous, so that the spectator can elucidate much of its meaning only after the fact.3 • 2
Double casting and themes
Geraldine Chaplin's dual role is central to the film's design: she plays Ana's mother and also Ana as an adult, reminiscing about the events of the film.8 The doubling reflects the film's critical account of the socialization of women and the roles imposed upon them under Francoism: children are condemned to live in a repressive world that forces them to imitate their elders and perpetuate their errors, an obsession with repetition that the double casting embodies.2
The film has been read as a subtle yet unmistakable indictment of the family as a repressive force in Spanish society.5 Saura himself said in 1975: "I believe we live immersed in a society that has been built upon an accumulation of errors … We are the products of a repressive education that has left us disarmed and defenceless in the face of many things."5 Critics have also connected the child's subversive relationship to time in the film to a challenge to the rigid linearity of Francoist historiography.9
Historical context and censorship
The film was shot in the summer of 1975, during the final months of Franco's dictatorship, and premiered in January 1976, two months after the dictator's death.5 Saura intended it as a meditation on the uncertain political future of mid-1970s Spain.10 Censorship was still operative at the time, and the film emerged in the last days of the regime thanks in part to the support of the nascent democratic press and the skills of producers such as Elías Querejeta.11 One study of Saura's camerawork argues that censorship under the dictatorship led him to use contrasts between high and low angle shots in Raise Ravens and to avoid historically charged settings that he used more explicitly in his post-Franco film Deprisa, deprisa (1981).12
At Cannes in May 1976 the film competed against another Querejeta production, Ricardo Franco's Pascual Duarte, and took the Special Jury Prize.13 • 2 It was also a Palme d'Or nominee, losing out to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and received César and Golden Globe nominations for Best Foreign Film.6
Reception and legacy
The film was commercially successful in Spain, drawing 1,292,417 spectators.4 Larousse's Dictionnaire mondial des films calls it one of Saura's most accomplished and most despairing works.3 In a 2011 review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called it a gripping, profoundly mysterious movie that deserves to be placed alongside Bergman's Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander.8
The film has remained a reference point for Spanish cinema about childhood under dictatorship. Scholars have paired it with Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) as films that reimagine childhood temporalities in late- and post-Franco Spain, and with Carla Simón's Estiu 1993 (2017) in studies of female orphans in Spanish-language cinema.9 • 14 A 4K restoration was screened in the Cinéma de la Plage program at Cannes in 2026, fifty years after its original release.13
Production details
Sources give the running time variously as 105 minutes (Festival de Cannes), 107 minutes (Filmoteca Española), 109 minutes (BFI and Criterion), and 110 minutes (BFI press release and Instituto Cervantes); the year of production is likewise given as 1975 by BFI, Larousse, and Instituto Cervantes, and as 1976 by Cannes, Criterion, and Filmoteca Española.7 • 4 • 15 • 16 The film was shot on 35 mm in color in a panoramic format, with locations in Madrid and Quintanar (Segovia).4
References
- Cría cuervos . . . (1976), The Criterion Collection
- Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens) film notes, University of Nebraska Omaha OLLAS Cinemateca (2008)
- Cría Cuervos, Larousse, Dictionnaire mondial des films
- Cría cuervos, ficha técnica, Filmoteca
- BFI press release: Cría Cuervos (Raise Ravens), 3 May 2011
- Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens) Dual Format Edition review, The Arts Shelf
- CRÍA CUERVOS, Festival de Cannes
- Peter Bradshaw, "Cría Cuervos (Raise Ravens) – review", The Guardian, 9 June 2011
- "Once upon a time": childhood temporalities in late- and Post-Franco Spanish cinema, Journal of Children and Media
- Cria! AKA Raise Ravens, Harvard Film Archive
- La película española que rozó la Palma de Oro en Cannes, Cadena SER
- Censorship, Creativity, and Camera: The Use of Camera Angle in Two Films by Carlos Saura, Murray State Digital Commons
- Desconocido actor teatral gana a Robert de Niro: 1976, el año en que España arrasó en Cannes, El País
- The time of the (orphan) child: Viewing Estiu 1993 with Cría cuervos, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas (2020)
- Cría cuervos (1975), BFI
- Cría cuervos, film notes, Instituto Cervantes Manila
Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1970s › Released 1975 to 1979
Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026
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