En el balcón vacío (On the Empty Balcony)
En el balcón vacío (On the Empty Balcony) was screened for the first time in June 1962 at the IFAL (Instituto Francés de América Latina) Cine Club in Mexico, to an audience made up of exiles and friends of its directors, Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío, including José de la Colina, Álvaro Mutis and Tomás Segovia, among others. Just two months later, it won the Fipresci Film Critics Prize at the Locarno Festival. The film is the only cinematic representation generated by Spanish exiles in Mexico. It constitutes the most heterodox example of the work carried out by the Nuevo Cine (New Cinema) group and, at the same time, appears retrospectively as a spectral reference point for modern Spanish cinema. However, En el balcón vacío was never regularly distributed, not even in Mexico, and its existence, both on screen and in books, has always been somewhat enigmatic. It circulated in video form from the beginning of the 1980s onwards, and several provisional digital versions were also produced later on. Consequently, awareness of the work was constrained by its limited access. While not strictly speaking a hidden film (in 2020, we included it in Santos Zunzunegui's Histories of Cinema series), it is a victim of the clandestine and precarious conditions under which it has been screened over the years.
The project presented here was born from a desire to create the best possible version of On the Empty Balcony, in an attempt to recreate the experience that those first viewers in 1962 must have had. To this end, all the surviving materials (held primarily in archives in Mexico and France) have been meticulously researched and compared.
The initiative began as Luis Alberto Juárez’s Master's graduation project. However, its scope has now transcended the academic field thanks, among others, to the support of the Government of Navarre, the collaboration of the Filmoteca UNAM, and, above all, Diego García Elío. The restoration work carried out over the past two years has also coincided with a renewed interest among young filmmakers and researchers in the work of Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío. One example is that some of the texts on this website correspond to research conducted by Valerie Pires at Columbia University.
Nuevo Cine Group: The Movement that Lasted a Moment
Valerie Pires (2025)
In the early 1960s, a collective of upcoming Spanish and Latin American artists based in Mexico City formed Grupo Nuevo Cine (New Cinema Group) to challenge the stagnation of Mexican cinema. The group emerged in response to a deep cultural, economic, and institutional crisis in the Mexican film industry. Frustrated by the formulaic studio productions, state censorship, and rigid control of powerful industry unions, the group advocated for creative freedom, aesthetic innovation, and institutional reform in the filmmaking process. Mirroring global film movements, primarily the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), Nuevo Cine called for a more socially engaged and artistically ambitious cinema.
The group—inspired by two towering figures of the cultural avant-garde, Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and Mexican poet Octavio Paz—quickly grew from an original core of 12 to more than 60 members, including critics, poets, painters, and filmmakers. Together, they reshaped Mexican film culture and laid the groundwork for independent and experimental cinema across Latin America. The core principles of Nuevo Cine—artistic independence, space for auteur cinema, and departure from commercial, union-backed filmmaking systems—were implemented in Mexican independent films between 1961 and 1965, a period marked by formal experimentation, political critique, and a reimagining of Mexican cinematic language. On the Empty Balcony (En el balcón vacío, J.G. Ascot, 1962) stands as a landmark of independent, non-union filmmaking, epitomizing the group’s commitment to operating outside traditional industry structures.
Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío
Nuevo Cine included several Spanish exiles who had fled Franco’s regime and found refuge in Mexico. Jomí García Ascot was a core founding member of Nuevo Cine. In 1939, 12-year-old García Ascot arrived in Mexico as a child refugee. He embraced displacement as an intellectual inheritance and gravitated toward structural rigor, philosophy, and cultural critique. His work as a poet, essayist, and filmmaker reflects a preoccupation with form and concepts; he sought to understand exile not merely as a personal loss, but as a political and cultural condition that demands engagement and commitment to freedom of expression. Through Nuevo Cine, he became the primary proponent of auteur films and experimental cinema, as well as the leading advocate for new independent cinema in Mexico.
Also from Spain, María Luisa Elío was born in Pamplona. Twelve-year-old Elío fled the Civil War with her family, arriving in Mexico in 1939. Although the actress-turned-writer was not formally a member of Grupo Nuevo Cine, she was inherently connected to the collective through her close relationships with its members. Those who knew and wrote about her describe a woman of great sensitivity and artistic vision whose outward warmth and charisma often masked an inner world marked by sorrow, fragility, and psychological unrest.
García Ascot and Elío shared experiences of cultural displacement, and their mutual involvement in Mexico’s vibrant artistic and intellectual circles facilitated their acquaintance. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, they actively participated in the Mexican cultural scene that included iconic artists and intellectuals such as Carlos Fuentes, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Elizondo, Emilio García Riera, José de la Colina, Gustavo Ramírez, Nancy Cárdenas, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Juan Rulfo, and Albert Isaac, among others. Elío was dedicated to the performing arts; García Ascot engaged in literary and cinematic works. While Elío channeled her inner world, García Ascot looked outward—toward history, aesthetics, and ethics. They married in 1952.
It is impossible not to connect the names of García Ascot and Elío with those of the Colombian Nobel Laureate, Gabriel García Márquez, who resided in Mexico City in the early 1960s. They were very close, and García Márquez’s magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), is dedicated to the couple.
In the late 1950s, shortly after the Cuban Revolution, García Ascot and Elío traveled to Cuba. García Ascot was pivotal in establishing the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), Cuba’s national film institute. During her time in Havana, Elío began writing short stories. Her memories, drafted in notebooks, eventually became the screenplay for the autobiographical film On the Empty Balcony.
Production and development
After García Ascot and Elío returned to Mexico City, they brought together the ideals of Nuevo Cine in the group’s premiere film production—the feature film On the Empty Balcony. García Ascot directed the screenplay adaptation of Elío’s original story, co-written by Elío, García Ascot, and their Spanish compatriot and fellow Spanish exile, Emilio García Riera. They set out to produce a feature-length film at a minimal cost. To achieve this, they purchased a 16mm Paillard-Bolex camera and approached their friend José María Torre, an advertising photographer, to operate it. Torre accepted enthusiastically. Thus, the film’s minimal technical crew was formed: García Ascot as director, assisted by García Riera, and Torre as cinematographer, with José Redondo assisting. They asked friends for money. Vicente Rojo, a Spanish Mexican painter and sculptor, donated a painting to be raffled off. Mexican artist Juan Soriano did the same. Others contributed raw film stock. They shot on Sundays because the crew and cast members had weekday paid jobs. They pulled old clothing out of trunks and scouted locations in Mexico City that evoked a European look—among them, the Condesa building and the Roma neighborhood. The cast and crew of On the Empty Balcony were like a family photo of Nuevo Cine—all friends and relatives. In total, filming took place over 40 Sundays.
The film had a staggeringly low budget: 50,000 pesos ($4,000), which would translate to about $43,000 in 2025, secured primarily through private donations. The financial limitation led García Ascot to use direct sound sparingly and strategically, in very few scenes with diegetic sound, where the characters speak on camera in real-time. His creative solution was to employ voiceover narration for most of the film. With a shooting schedule limited by tight time and a low budget, García Ascot edited a working copy as soon as he received the developed footage. Once filming was completed, he added sound to the film by recording the three audio tracks—sound effects, music, and dialogue. After the film was edited, two prints were made.
Exile, Identity, and Temporal Displacement in On the Empty Balcony
Valerie Pires (2025)
On the Empty Balcony is narrated in the first and third person through voiceover in the present and past tense. It offers an unsettling glimpse into a lifetime of pain where hope is sparse, healing is questionable, and the road is arduous as Gabriela Elizondo, the protagonist, finds herself trapped in an unresolved, fractured, and unrepairable childhood.
The premise is that a woman, once a child refugee after escaping the Spanish Civil War and now living as an adult in Mexico City, ruminates over the traumatic events of her childhood. The film portrays Elío’s autobiographical journey through her childhood in Spain and her exile in France and Mexico. Gabriela appears first as a child (played by Nuri Pereña) and later as an adult (played by Elío). The film is a tale of lost identity, transnational belonging, and grown-up Gabriela’s desperate attempts to process her childhood trauma. At the end of the film, the insurmountable suffering the young girl from Pamplona endures is devastating, transforming the child threatened and rejected by her nation into a traumatized Spanish Mexican woman.
The disruption strikes young Gabriela’s home on a quiet morning as a mundane routine plays out inside the family apartment. By depicting an ordinary day in this peaceful, still, dimly lit, and unmemorable home, García Ascot heightens the violent and unexpected contrast of what is about to crash onto all of them from the outside. García Ascot’s camera pans the home like Gabriela’s memory recalls it, as close to reality as possible —slowly, gradually, meticulously, not missing anything. It is a continuous exploration of memory presented on the screen, a past existential state of mind seen through the present lens. He barely edits the opening sequence, allowing the viewer to observe the terrifying scene that Gabriela witnesses in the film’s real life, in real time, presented through recalled memory in mostly long, uncut shots. The aesthetic experience of seeing young Gabriela on camera, listening to the narration of grown-up Gabriela explaining what happened on that day in long takes, as a melancholic solo piano from a Bach sonata plays in the background, gives an aspect of dreamy memory to the entire sequence. The viewer follows images, narration, and music of mostly uncut long takes, not as a spectator but as a witness to the before and after of a befallen reality.
The narration allowed García Ascot to create a “voice that remembers,” a female voice that informs the viewer of Gabriela’s story, as if the director grants viewers the privilege of listening to the protagonist’s thoughts. The way the inner time of the characters is conveyed in On the Empty Balcony evokes what Marguerite Duras accomplished in the screenplay of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), a foundational film of the French New Wave distinguished by its nonlinear narrative structure and poetic dialogue.
On the Empty Balcony explores the relationship between time and memory through the protagonist’s delirious experiences. In the film, as in Elío’s prose literature, delusion and delirium emerge as the connecting elements to salvage memory, while the two Gabrielas—the child and the woman—embody two realities of the present and the past. People and places appear and disappear, a recurring theme in the film. The multi-temporal and time-bridging experience of exile is given visual form in On the Empty Balcony through the shifts in narrative space and time. The film’s fragmented text, sounds, and images, along with the radical transpositions in the narrative, harsh and abrupt as experienced by Elío in real life, conjure feelings of displacement and chaos. Imprinted on the reels is a profound and continuous philosophical meditation on loss and longing, presented through nonlinear historical narrative, that conveys a cinematic reinterpretation of exile, estrangement, and the construction of a transnational identity.
García Ascot employs various techniques to portray nostalgia on film, including long takes, sparse editing, jump cuts, newsreel footage, non-diegetic sound (such as Tomás Bretón’s "La verbena de la Paloma" and traditional folk songs of the era), stream-of-consciousness narrative, and fragmented space and time. These filmic elements evoke historical memory within physical spaces (in Spain, France, and Mexico) and internal spheres, supported by the narrated reflections of the fictional Gabriela and the real-life Elío. The director presents fractured parts of a broader narrative, the micro-story within macro-history, with memories collected before and after the trauma of exile.
García Ascot and Elío’s collaboration in On the Empty Balcony embodies their differing personal and artistic sensibilities. The film is neither entirely hers nor his—it is the convergence of two distinct ways of going through a shared human experience. Elío’s cinematic language was more lyrical and existential, while García Ascot’s was more structured and analytical. Together, they expanded the scope of what Mexican cinema and literature could express, creating a deeply personal and universally resonant film.
On the Empty Balcony is the only film that represents the Republican exiles living in Mexico, produced while Franco was still in power. It is a film in which the Spanish exile reflects on itself. At times, it evokes a documentary quality, heightened by the inclusion of real footage from the war and the escape across the Pyrenees—images secured through the mediation of Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, whom García Ascot met in Cuba.
Once the film was edited in 1962, García Ascot held a special screening at the IFAL Cine Club in Mexico City. It was an immediate hit within the cinephile circles. Later that year, On the Empty Balcony was screened at the Locarno Film Festival, where the International Critics Association awarded it the FIPRESCI Prize. In 1963, the film was also awarded the Golden Janus at the Latin American Film Review in Sestri Levante, Italy.
Despite receiving international acclaim, the leadership of the Mexican studio apparatus did not support García Ascot’s release, making commercial distribution impossible. Consequently, On the Empty Balcony was excluded from mainstream theaters in Mexico.
If art-house film critics and avant-garde filmmakers quickly positioned On the Empty Balcony as one of the most significant experimental films of the 1960s, a global awakening took time. For decades, the film remained unseen and unknown. In recent years, the film has been studied, screened, and honored in Spain, France, and Mexico. Both García Ascot and Elío’s historical significance and cultural legacy have seen growing recognition, and On the Empty Balcony is now widely regarded as a superb example of how cinema has a unique capacity to reinterpret and represent the profound sense of estrangement that arises from exile.
The film remained in independent circuits until its official premiere on May 31, 1976, at the Jorge Stahl Hall of the Cineteca Nacional. Its brief distribution also kept the film unknown to the Spanish public. It remained unknown to a large part of that audience until the mid-20th century, when researcher Charo Alonso García brought several VHS copies that quickly spread among her contacts, revealing to many, especially, the existence of the life and work of María Luisa Elío, and becoming a small cult film that circulated only in video format due to the lack of prints.
In 2023, as part of the EQZE’s Master’s degree in Film Preservation Studies, student Luis Alberto Juárez Pineda floated the idea of digitally restoring On the Empty Balcony under the tutelage of archivist and filmmaker Inés Toharia. The film had previously been restored in 2009 by Filmoteca UNAM, under the leadership of Francisco Gaytan and Roman Gubern, resulting in a new 35 mm copy that was later circulated in standard-quality digital format, distributed in DVD and later uploaded to YouTube. The new restoration proposed by Juárez Pineda aimed to continue the work initiated in 2009 and to create a new digital version of the film that would preserve all the characteristics of the original material.
Research into the materials
To initiate this new restoration, the first step was to locate the best available materials of the film. All the materials contained at the Filmoteca UNAM were analysed, including both the materials resulting from the 2009 restoration (a composite duplicate negative in 35 mm, its positive in 35 mm—both resulting from the restoration—and another copy in 35 mm that had been discarded during the same process) and previous materials such as a composite duplicate negative in 16 mm from a previous generation. This search also prompted the researchers to inspect other materials held at the Cineteca Nacional de México, Filmoteca Española, Cinematheque Suisse and Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC), where they found subtitled and duplicate prints from later generations.
After a comparative analysis of all available materials, the combined 16mm negative duplicate from Filmoteca UNAM was selected as the best existing source for the new restoration. This negative duplicate originated from a print made during the film's production period, which film historian, co-screenwriter, and assistant director of the film, Emilio García Riera, referred to as a "nearly good print [1]". With the original negatives lost, this print is presumed to be the one that was exhibited in the film clubs of that era and the one that traveled worldwide, even being used to create the dubbed French versions. Fortunately, the negative duplicate obtained from it has remained well-preserved and currently represents the best material available.
At that point, a collaboration agreement was signed with the Filmoteca UNAM to enable the researchers to access, inspect and digitise the selected material. Agreements were also signed and the necessary authorisations obtained from the García-Elío family (through María Luisa and Jomí’s son, Diego García Elío) to enable the project to move forward.
[1] "Once filming was complete, the film was sound-synchronized by recording the three tracks (sound effects, music, and dialogue) and then joining them through a process whose name I don't recall now. Finally, the original negative was obtained, from which two prints were made in a laboratory: the first one poor, and the second one fair, almost good. A special screening of this latter print was held at the Sala Moliere of IFAL. Afterward, Jomí and María Luisa went to Europe to present the film at the Locarno festival". García Riera, Emilio. "El Cine. En el balcón vacío I. La filmación," Revista de la Universidad de México, June 1962.
Digitisation and digital restoration
The 16 mm composite duplicate negative was scanned in October 2024 at the Filmoteca UNAM with a resolution of 2K, a colour depth of 10 bits and WAV 32 bit and 96 kHz sound files.
The materials scanned in Mexico were restored at the EQZE’s digital laboratory by a group of students under the supervision of Luis Juárez Pineda. After critically observing the materials, the digital restoration process was carried out frame by frame to repair any problems printed onto the materials (damages, scratches, stains, dust), as well as any stemming from the instability of previous duplicates. Some aspects remained untouched, such as the splices joining different takes, which correspond to the type of editing carried out independently during production.
Furthermore, the critical analysis enabled researchers to identify images from the Spanish Civil War that had been incorporated into the film after being donated to the group by Joris Ivens. These images belong to The Spanish Earth, a 1937 documentary by Joris Ivens, narrated by Orson Welles and co-written by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, and Prudencio de Pereda. Ivens and García Ascot met in Cuba, and the Dutch filmmaker provided some shots from his 1937 film for inclusion in García Ascot's work. During the digital restoration, the identification of these reused images led to a proposal for a distinct image treatment, as their inferior visual quality is inherent to the original footage.
Here are some examples illustrating the restoration work done at EQZE.
- Original title: En el balcón vacío (On the Empty Balcony)
- Year: 1961-1962
- Premiere: 1962
- Duration: 70 min.
- Country: Mexico
- Director: Jomí García Ascot
- Production: Ascot / Torre (NC)
- Cast: Nuri Pereña, María Luisa Elío, Conchita Genovés, Belina García
- Original screenplay and dialogues: María Luisa Elío
- Adaptation: María Luisa Elío, Jomí García Ascot, Emilio García Riera
- Photography: José Torre
- Assistant director: Emilio García Riera
- Camera assistant: Ramón Redondo
- Edition: Jorge Espejel
- Sound: Rivatón de América
- Operator: José Quintero
- Technical Unit: Servicios Fotográficos Torre
- Title design: Vicente Rojo
Restored in 2K at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (2025) in collaboration with the UNAM Film Archive and TV UNAM, with funding from the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, the Government of Navarre and Luis Alberto Juárez Pineda.
The digital restoration was carried out at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola and the scanning was carried out at the UNAM Film Archive. Duplicate negatives of the images and optical sound in 16 mm were used. These materials, consisting of two pairs of black and white rolls with a total length of 600 meters, are preserved by Filmoteca UNAM.
Duration of the restored version: 00:56:37:13
- Executive production: Arrate Velasco Delgado, Carlos Muguiro Altuna
- Research: Luis Alberto Juárez Pineda, Inés Toharia
- Digital image restoration: Luis Alberto Juárez Pineda
- Digital image cleaning assistants: Jorge Jaramillo, Andrés Martínez de la Viña, Pablo Retuerta, Amanda Soares
- Color grading: Edgar Flores Ogarrio, CSI, CAM (Anónima Post)
- Color grading assistant: Adriana L. García Zamudio (Anónima Post)
- Sound restoration: Xabier Erkizia (audio-lab)
- Data Management: Luis Alberto Juárez Pineda, Mayra Mendoza Villa (Anónima Post)
- Technical advice: María Fuentes, Carolina Cappa, Clara Sánchez-Dehesa
- Technical department: Asier Armental Lemos, Cristina Neira i Aparicio
- Subtitling: Studio Seven, Subtitula'm
Premiere: Il Cinema Ritrovato
