Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola recovers "En el balcón vacío", a seminal work in republican exile cinema

Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola has restored En el balcón vacío (On the Empty Balcony, Jomi García Ascot, 1962), one of the most significant films to be made by republican exiles and the only one to portray the life of exiles living in Mexico.

Produced while Franco was still in power, the film is based on the memories of writer and actress María Luisa Elío (Pamplona, 1926-Mexico City, 2009). Forced into exile in Mexico in 1940, María Luisa Elío married the son of another exiled family, José Miguel (Jomi) García Ascot, an essayist and filmmaker and a key figure in the founding of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). The film charts the traumatic childhood and exile of Gabriela Elizondo (played by Nuri Pereña and María Luisa Elío herself), a woman who, while still in Mexico, confronts her past as a young refugee fleeing the Spanish Civil War.

The restoration project, which was carried out at EQZE and was based on materials held at the UNAM Film Archive in Mexico, was preceded by rigor

ous research in Spanish, French, Mexican and Swiss archives. The idea arose from the Master’s graduation project carried out by Luis Alberto Juárez Pineda, a student on the Film Preservation Studies course at EQZE. The recovery of this important work was made possible thanks to the support provided by the Government of Navarra and the collaboration of the UNAM Film Archive and Diego García Elío, son of Jomí García Ascot and Maria Luisa Elío.

Context and production

Jomí García Ascot worked in collaboration with Emilio García Riera–another fellow exile–to adapt María Luisa Elío's autobiography and started shooting the film with a budget of just 50,000 pesos (equivalent to around $43,000 in 2025). Most of the money was obtained through private donations by friends and artists such as Vicente Rojo and Juan Soriano. The film was shot using a 16 mm Paillard Bolex camera over the course of 40 Sundays, due to the limited availability of the technical team and cast (made up of friends and family members). Budget restraints forced the filmmaker to rely mainly on voice-over narration. After the end of the shot, García Ascot added sound by recording three audio tracks: effects, music and dialogue. Once the film had been edited, only two copies were made.

In 1962, García Ascot organised a special screening at the Film Club of the French Institute of Latin America in Mexico. The film enjoyed instant success among cinemagoers. That same year, En el balcón vacío was screened at the Locarno Film Festival, winning the FIPRESCI Prize awarded by the International Critics Association. In 1963, the film received the Golden Janus award at the Latin American Film Exhibition in Sestri Levante, Italy.

Despite international acclaim, however, the Mexican studios did not support the première of García Ascot’s work, and the film was never shown in conventional cinema theatres. As a result, although independent film critics and the world of avant-garde cinema hailed En el balcón vacío as one of the most significant experimental works of the 1960s, the film remained undiscovered and unknown for decades. Over recent years, the work of Elío and García Ascot has once again begun to attract attention and has been the subject of numerous studies, screenings and tributes in Spain, France and Mexico.

Restoration process

In 2023, Luis Alberto Juárez Pineda, a student at EQZE, presented a project to digitally restore the film, creating a new version that preserved all the original's characteristics. To complete this project, a search was carried out to find the best film elements available in archives such as the National Mexican Film Archive, the Spanish Film Archive, the UNAM Film Archive, Cinémathèque Suisse and the Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée (CNC). After painstaking research, it was decided that the most appropriate material to use for the restoration was a 16 mm negative preserved at the UNAM Film Archive.

In October 2024, this duplicate was scanned in 2K resolution at the UNAM Film Archive and then digitally restored at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola’s laboratories by a group of students under the supervision of Juárez Pineda. The restoration process was carried out frame by frame in order to repair any defects such as breakages, scratches, stains and dust marks. However, the decision was made not to intervene in certain aspects such as the original splices, which reflect the type of cut used during the production.

The restoration also enabled the team to identify archive images from the Spanish Civil War, which were included in the film. These sequences were taken from The Spanish Earth, a documentary made in 1937 by the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, co-written by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman and Prudencio de Pereda, and narrated by Orson Welles.

The restoration of En el balcón vacío was selected in June to participate in the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna. However, it will be officially presented during the San Sebastián International Film Festival, within the Klasikoak section.

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