A 1972 Spanish drama so raw it makes modern trauma porn look like a sitcom.
While conducting interviews with women working in local brothels, Fernando, a journalist, meets Elisa. The woman will tell him her dramatic story, which begins at age 14 when she is raped by her godfather.
Acting
Elisa Laguna's performance carries impossible weight with zero melodrama.
Direction
Grau's documentary-style interviews blur fiction and exploitation cinema ethics.
Director
Jorge Grau
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Canticle arrived during Spain's late-Franco 'destape' era, when laxer censorship allowed explicit content but rarely with this much social critique.
Director Jorge Grau is better known for his 1974 zombie film Let Sleeping Corpses Lie—making Canticle's obscurity partly about genre snobbery, not just its bleakness.
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