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Almería Western Film Festival 2025
The Almería Western Film Festival is a unique kind of film forum. Hosted by the town of Tabernas, the festival celebrates both the Western genre and the local legacy of filmmaking. The surrounding desert landscape has appeared in countless movies over the years, particularly Westerns, including, of course, Sergio Leone’s […]
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Dead Souls
Alex Cox’s new film ‘Dead Souls‘ is now making the festival circuit. Loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s novel of the same name, the protagonist, named Strindler (and played by Cox himself), travels through the American southwest seeking to buy the names and details of Mexicans who have died while encountering […]
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Alex Cox’s Last Movie in Almeria 1
Alex Cox is currently at work on what he is calling his ‘last movie.’ And, of course, it involves shooting in Almería. Last month I had the extraordinary opportunity to visit the set.
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2024 Almeria Western Film Festival
Western film fans and curious onlookers gathered last week in Tabernas for the 14th Almeria Western Film Festival.
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The Story of El Condor 1
I put together this short video about one of my favorite film sets in Almería, which appears in “Once Upon a Time in Almeria: The Legacy of Hollywood in Spain” (Daylight Books 2017).
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El Astronauta
This 1970 Spanish comedy follows Pepe (Tony LeBlanc), a small town dreamer who, after watching the US moon landing on television, decides to build his own rocket to the moon. Amazingly, after numerous setbacks, he finally blasts off into space before coming to a rough landing in a desolate lunar […]
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Is this Hollywood?
“You can sit here and look around the back and think you were in Los Angeles. Except it hasn’t got that word ‘Hollywood’ scorched across it.” from an interview with the late Eddie Fowlie, David Lean’s “Dedicated Maniac” Once Upon a Time in Almería: The Legacy of Hollywood in Spain’ […]
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Mini-Hollywood
Following the success of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Sergio Leone commissioned Carlo Simi to construct an entire western town for the second title in the trilogy, For a Few Dollars More. Two rival bounty hunters, (Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef), both in pursuit of the fugitive El Indio, […]
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Coverage of “Once Upon a Time in Almería” in the Daily Mail
This week the Daily Mail published a feature article on my photo project documenting the legacy of Hollywood and international filmmaking in Almeria, Spain. Here is one excerpt from the interview published in the article: ‘The Western towns built by Sergio Leone and others were not meant to be accurate […]
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Mark Parascandola discusses his project ‘Once Upon a Time in Almeria’ with local experts during the Almería Western Film Festival
Excerpts from the press conference for the exhibit “Érase una vez en Almería: decorados, restos y paisajes del cine” are now posted online. The brief presentation includes statements from Francisco Alonso, head of the Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, Mar Verdejo, coordinator of the exhibition, and myself, talking about the content […]
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