Helena Cortesina

Helena Cortesina was a pioneering Spanish film director, actor, producer, and theatrical entrepreneur. She directed and produced the first known film by a Spanish woman, Flor de España o la leyenda de un torero (1921), which has since been lost. She acted in the film alongside her sisters, Ofelia and Angélica, who were collectively referred to as the Hermanas Cortesina². She began her career as a dancer, performing to songs by Spanish composers, with an aesthetic heavily influenced by Greek art². Cortesina has been identified as one of the models for the 1917 painting Danzarinas griegas, by the painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida². She later founded a production company, Cortesina Films, in Madrid in 1921³². The direction and screenwriting of Flor de España was long attributed to priest and playwright José María Granada, but this is contradicted by reviews that indicate that Cortesina directed while Granada only edited the script³. In 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Cortesina joined the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture². In order to escape fascism, she and her son Juan Manuel Fontanals, one of two children she had with stage designer Manuel Fontanals, escaped to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1937². There, she established a theater company with Andrés Mejuto that produced a number of Spanish plays². She continued to act in films, including 1945's La dama duende, based on a 17th-century play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. She died in Buenos Aires in 1984. Her legacy as one of the early masters of cinema, especially in the fields of animation and special effects, has been reevaluated by film historians and enthusiasts. Her films influenced the surrealist work of filmmakers Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, making her, in many ways, the mother of Spanish cinema.