Rafael Cobos, whose “The Left-Handed Son” won Canneseries short form top prize in 2022, has just world premiered “Golpes,” his feature film debut which looks likely to consecrate him as one of Spain’s major new directorial voices.

Best-known as the co-scribe of Alberto Rodríguez – co-penning 2014 Goya best picture winner “Marshland” and 2017’s “The Plague,” Movistar Plus’ first big series, both set in or near Cobos’ native Seville – Cobos returns to the city again in “Golpes.” It stars three-time Goya winner Luis Tosar (“Mondays in the Sun,” “Take My Eyes” and “Cell 211”), and produced by Borja Pena and Emma Lustres at Vaca Films (“Cell 211, “Gangs of Galicia”) with France’s Playtime, part of the Vuelta Group, which also handles worldwide sales.

“Golpes” is set in the summer of 1982, as Spain gallops, it seems, to a modern, democratic future, seven years after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

Migueli leaves jail to get together his old crew for a series of bold heists. Closing in on him is his own brother, who’s become a cop, throwing in his lot with the winners of Spain’s Civil War.

Written by Cobos and Fernando Navarro (“Saturn Return,” “Veronica”), “Golpes” builds on a notable, home-grown Spanish sub-genre, the so-called “quinqui” cinema – think Carlos Saura’s 1981 Berlin Golden Bear winner “Deprisa, Deprisa” or Eloy de la Iglesia’s 1980 “Navajeros” – which featured marginalized working class criminals, heists, police brutality, racy diction, heroin abuse and vague sense of desire for freedom and visceral contempt for authority and middle-class convention.

Music plays a prominent role in “Deprisa, Deprisa,” such as in gutsy flamenco pop anthem “Me Quedo Contigo.” “Golpes,” in this and other directions, however, goes its own way. It “gives everything ‘qujnqui’ a heart and dignity,” wrote Luis Martínez at Spanish newspaper El Mundo this week.

When the four young delinquent friends in “Desprisa, Deprisa” visit Madrid’s Cerro de los Ángeles monument, they haven’t got a clue how the Spanish Civil War bullet holes got there.

Migueli, (Jesús Carroza, “7 Virgins,” “Offworld”) in contrast, walks out of prison with unfinished business buried deep in the past, “Golpes’” synopsis notes. He commits the robberies not for riches or revenge but to reclaim the land where his father, a Republican outlaw after the Civil War, lies in an unmarked grave, soon to be erased by developers. The film’s beating heart is how Sabino reacts to that prompted by his rencounter with Migueli, with a new girlfriend, the only family he’s got.

*Variety *talked to Cobos just after the world premiere of “Golpes” at Valladolid.

Migueli and his gang share with the the heroes of “quinqui” cinema a visceral hate for Spain’s establishment. Migueli stands apart, however, by his memory of the past.

I completely agree. Though we could say that enough time has passed for us to be able to say that these “quinquis,” young rebels which went against the system, could respond to an evident political reason which had its origins in the Spanish Civil War.

“Golpes” gives a sense of a Spain on the cusp of modernity, with part of the country, however, being left behind. This is captured in an early scene when Miguelí walks to his pension and you cut to contemporary archive footage…

Yes. Migueli returns to a humble poor part of Seville, which you can see in the dirt on the walls. The archive footage captures ragged children who look like orphans, street kids. We were in the summer of 1982, on the cusp of Spain’s having its first left wing government in many decades, and yet here there’s a sense of a near post-War very marginal Seville.

You’ve talked about “Golpes“ as a “subtle fable that attempts to depict a country in the midst of transition – a contradictory, disorientated country unable to settle the score with its past.” That can be seen in your direction which very often mixes old and new, such as the pension, with modern drawers but an old gas-burner….

The pension, Antúnez’s home, is like a kind of casa de vecino, a traditional Sevillian community dwelling which is now disappearing. When we were shooting interiors, there was sounds of construction coming from outside. Her house has the latest records from the ‘70s, early ‘80s, and more folkloric, traditionalist facets….

The film is also highly emotional, lyrical….

Yes, that was my intention. I wanted a highly emotional, moving film which was also very lyrical, with an important poetic edge. And I think it’s there.

One way to create emotion is music, such as in the soundtrack playing when Miguelí returns home….

The hero’s return, right? The music is crucial. As you’ve said, the film is a reply, or reimagining of Spain’s “cinema quinqui.”

But I wanted to go against everything. The quinqui cinema we remember was much rawer, rougher, immediate and direct. Its music was flamenco, mixed with other genres, the Los Chunguitos, Los Chichos, the Catalan rumba, I wanted something that was more sophisticated. At the beginning of the film one of the songs has a strictly flamenco seguidilla base, used in many songs but I wanted to take it to a much more poetic, disruptive level.

**Another route to emotion are the film’s actors, here Jesús Carroza y Luis Tosar…. **

Yes, they’re both spectacular. Jesús, from a sense of honesty, truth, authenticity and Luis has that and incredible actor’s technique.

**And aid what I think is your goal – a cross between socio-political issues and entertainment. **

“Golpes” has a vocation of entertainment and to move audiences, but at the same time that’s a pretext for buried socio-political questions, so that at the end, having experienced the story’s journey in the film, there’s a critique, or at least an intention to raise questions. Cinema’s vocation it to be seen, move and if possible raise questions, a lot of them.

You say that at a time that even in 2025 Spain, the issue of Spain’s historical memory has not been totally resolved.

Exactly, not as an issue nor, I’d say, as an almost problem. Time passes and we don’t get to any kind of consensus, and it’s still bones buried under dark earth in God-forsaken ditches. That’s terrible.

**And how do you want to move forward? **

I’d love to go on writing with Alberto. Writing is my drive. But I want to go on directing, if I can as soon as possible.

Golpes Credit: Julio Vergne