Almodovar films story of poet jailed by Franco

Pedro Almodovar, the Oscar-winning Spanish director famed for his colourful and frenetic sex comedies, is to film the tender autobiography of a communist poet who spent 23 years in prison during the darkest years of the Franco dictatorship.

Marcos Ana, now 88, was 19 when General Francisco Franco had him thrown in jail in 1939. As a political inmate who had fought against Franco's victorious troops during the Spanish Civil War, Ana was tortured, shunted from prison to prison and managed to avoid two death sentences before he emerged, bewildered to the point of nausea, a free man in 1961. He was 41 but retained the desires of innocent youth. The film, which will be a world away from Almodovar's habitual high-octane cinema, is based on Ana's autobiography Tell Me What A Tree Looks Like, published in September. Almodovar secured the rights to the book last week.

Marcos Ana is a nom de plume formed by combining his parents' first names: his real name is Fernando Macarro Castillo. The film will focus on his first sexual encounter, with a prostitute he meets soon after his release into the blinding light and deafening noise of 1960s Madrid, and to whom he recounts his life story. The pair wander through the nocturnal miseries of Spain's subjugated capital and, as dawn breaks, she refuses his money.

Yesterday, Ana told El Pais newspaper that he and the flamboyant film-maker, 58, had formed a close friendship "like in the finale of Casablanca". Ana describes in his memoir how he started writing poetry in 1954 in a punishment cell. Other prisoners memorised his verses and, when they were released, recited them to sympathisers. The poems began to appear in the publications of solidarity committees in exile.

"Poetry was another weapon to fight for freedom," Ana said yesterday. "I don't know if my poems are good or bad, only that they were necessary." He said that his youthful communist ideals remained intact, adding: "The world is unjust and must change. Many young people know another world is possible."

In 1963, Ana spent a long night recounting his story to his friend, the communist poet Pablo Neruda. The Chilean Nobel Prize-winner bitterly regretted not recording the conversation, and insisted that the Spanish poet write his autobiography, which he eventually did more than 40 years later.

Almodovar told El Pais that filming Ana's story was an opportunity to help reconcile a Spain still deeply divided between the victims and supporters of Franco.

"Marcos is completely free from hatred – a victim who does not seek revenge," Almodovar said. "He pleads that the horror endured by the Spanish people during and after the civil war is never repeated."

The venture is a departure from Almodovar's usual subjects. His movies, including Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, Talk To Her, and the Oscar-winning All About My Mother, mostly explore personal and sexual liberation in a society bursting from dictatorship into democracy. His anti-establishment sympathies are barely concealed and offend many Spaniards, but never before has he directly confronted the painful legacy of the nation's political past.