In Blood Wedding, the play by the Spanish poet and playwright Garcia Lorca, a bride is swept away from her wedding by a former suitor, whom she still loves. They are pursued by the groom, and what follows is a bloody duel, the blood wedding. Antonio Gades' flamenco-ballet version of the Lorca story maintains the strong Andalusian atmosphere while it distills the details of ethnic tradition and dramatic narrative into a modern ballet. Carlos Saura's film of the Gades ballet removes it even further from the original drama, but remains in a strange way true to both play and ballet. Saura begins shooting in the dressing room and in rehearsals and moves on to a full dress performance. Variety's original review notes, "A proof of the skills of dancers, director and cameraman Teo Escamilla is that they can achieve such an absorbing film with hardly any props, relying only on the starkness of the empty studio. But the magic is created by the camera and the smooth, hypnotic dancing of Gades which enables us to 'see' the wedding, the conflict..." In answer to the critical debate as to what such a film does to its dance subject, Naomi Wise writes in the Express, "...it isn't a film-about-dance, but an exemplary dance film, in which film remains foremost."