Winner of two GOYA AWARDS®, The Year of the Discovery explores the contradictions lived in Spain in 1992. In this pivotal year, Spain celebrated both the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in Sevilla, presenting the country as an emerging new democracy to the international community. In the meantime, workers in Cartagena protested a threat to industrial jobs with an uprising that culminated in the burning of the regional parliament.

Shot on Hi-8 videotape entirely within a smoky bar in the city of Cartagena, through one-on-one interviews, complex split-screen compositions, and subtle manipulations of time, Luis López Carrasco’s documentary offers a vivid counternarrative to the official history; one in which industrial labor’s toll on the body and the brutal fracturing of communities testifies against a national mythology of progress.

"It is a river of astonishingly fluid language (...) whose formal beauty and its ambitious split-screen device serve to resonate (...) the last bursts of the working class of southern Spain at the time of its deindustrialization." - Libération

"What emerges is a prodigy: the artifact, not only documentary, more surprising and even essential that Spanish cinematography has produced in a long time." - El Mundo

"Built stone by stone, or testimony to testimony, "The Year of Discovery" is a wall of resistance against the forgetfulness, fear and silence of the workers of a country in crisis." - El País

"The testimonies of Cartagena people who lived through the struggles of 1992, experiencing police brutality along with disillusionment with the neoliberal policies of the supposedly "socialist" government are articulate, vivid and attractive." - The Hollywood Reporter

"An overflowing work, with a monumental character and a panoramic image that is multiplied thanks to a permanent split screen." - Cinemanía

Cinéma Du Réel; Grand Prix; Prix des Bibliothèques; Cinespaña Toulouse Spanish Film Festival - Best Documentary; Barcelona Independant Film Festival L´Alternativa; Mar Del Plata International Film Festival - Astor Piazzolla Best Feature Award; Jeonju International Film Festival - Special Jury Prize; Thessaloniki Film Forward - Golden Alexander Award; Nantes Spanish Film Festival; Las Palmas De Gran Canaria International Film Festival; Rotterdam International Film Festival; San Sebastián International Film Festival; Independent International Film Festival Indielisboa; New York Film Festival; Viennale Vienna International Film Festival