La capitana Alegría (Pour Don Carlos)

Recently restored, it’s one of the first fiction feature films shot in the Basque Country. It tells the 1875 adventures of Captain Alegría, a strategist at the service of Don Carlos de Borbón in his struggle to become King of Spain. Musidora produces, acts and co-directs the film with the aristocrat Jaime de Lasuen, a young Frenchman belonging to a family of Carlist exiles, who signed the film under the pseudonym of Jacques Lasseyne. Pour Don Carlos, based on the novel by Pierre Benoît, had fallen into complete oblivion until 2016 when the Parisian Friends of Musidora Association located two copies, incomplete and in poor condition, in the Cinémathèque Française and in Toulouse, initiating their complete restoration in collaboration with the Basque Film Archive, among other entities.

Musidora (Jeanne Roques) was born in Paris on February 23rd, 1889. She was a French actress, director and screenwriter, considered one of the first women filmmakers in history. She became famous in the 1910s for her role as Irma Vep, the thief dressed in black, in Louis Feuillade's series Les Vampires (1915-1916), which made her an icon of silent and fantasy films. Musidora also wrote and directed several films, such as The Vagabond (1918) and Soleil et Ombre (1922), many of them now lost. She was a pioneer in portraying complex female characters and challenging gender stereotypes in film. She passed in Paris on December 11th, 1957.

Year of Production: 1921

Time: 90’

Country: France

Language: Text Cards in French

Directors: Musidora and Jacques Lasseyne

Cast:Musidora, Stephen Weber, Abel Tarride

Production Companies:  Les Films Musidora