"Even before the rise of the various regional cinemas within Spain in the late Seventies, Barcelona always existed as a kind of 'alternative' production center to the Madrid-based commercial cinema. In the Forties, a group of Barcelona film buffs, known as the 'teluricos' ('the essentialists'), created a cinema dedicated to formal experimentation; Life in Shadows is the masterpiece of that movement. An amateur filmmaker's wife is killed while he is out filming streetfighting during the Civil War. Convinced of his ultimate responsibility for her death, he becomes increasingly drawn into a private, obsessional world whose frontiers are the Civil War, his own filmmaking, and Hitchcock's Rebecca. Subtle yet highly disturbing, Llobet Gracia's only film is a profound reflection of an era in which the lines between fact and fantasy had all but disappeared." -Richard Peña