Canneseries Winner Rafael Cobos Bows Feature Debut ‘Golpes’

Rafael Cobos, whose “The Left-Handed Son” won Canneseries short form top prize in 2022, has just world premiered “Golpes,” his feature film debut which looks likely to consecrate him as one of Spain’s major new directorial voices. 

Best-known as the co-scribe of Alberto Rodríguez – co-penning 2014 Goya best picture winner “Marshland” and 2017’s “The Plague,” Movistar Plus’ first big series, both set in or near Cobos’ native Seville – Cobos returns to the city again in “Golpes.” It stars three-time Goya winner Luis Tosar (“Mondays in the Sun,” “Take My Eyes” and “Cell 211”), and produced by Borja Pena and Emma Lustres at Vaca Films (“Cell 211, “Gangs of Galicia”) with France’s Playtime, part of the Vuelta Group, which also handles worldwide sales.

“Golpes” is set in the summer of 1982, as Spain gallops, it seems, to a modern, democratic future, seven years after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

Migueli leaves jail to get together his old crew for a series of bold heists. Closing in on him is his own brother, who’s become a cop, throwing in his lot with the winners of Spain’s Civil War.

Written by Cobos and Fernando Navarro (“Saturn Return,” “Veronica”), “Golpes” builds on a notable, home-grown Spanish sub-genre, the so-called “quinqui” cinema – think Carlos Saura’s 1981 Berlin Golden Bear winner “Deprisa, Deprisa” or Eloy de la Iglesia’s 1980 “Navajeros” – which featured marginalized working class criminals, heists, police brutality, racy diction, heroin abuse and vague sense of desire for freedom and visceral contempt for authority and middle-class convention.

Music plays a prominent role in “Deprisa, Deprisa,” such as in gutsy flamenco pop anthem “Me Quedo Contigo.”  “Golpes,” in this and other directions, however, goes its own way. It “gives everything ‘qujnqui’ a heart and dignity,” wrote…