If we had to write a short biography, we could classify Augusto M. Torres as a writer and filmmaker, but that would be an understatement. At 81 years of age, the Madrid-born writer has had so many facets to his life that to pigeonhole him in any one of them would not do him justice. A contributor to the newspaper El País for twenty-five years, he has written screenplays alongside Rafael Azcona and Vicente Molina Foix, who accompanied him during the press conference, and has produced films as essential as that marvel called Arrebato (1979), by Iván Zulueta.

_{Augusto M. Torres (director), Mayuca Gil de Biedma (productor) y Vicente Molina Foix}

With camera in hand, he has directed horrible films to hide other wonderful ones and, with notebook on the table, he has written several books interspersed with narrative fiction and film notebooks. It has taken 57 years for La mano de madera to start being able to move its fingers. The film was shot at the end of the 1960s and after its premiere in 1968 at the festivals of Pesaro (Italy) and Mannheim (Germany), it passed into oblivion without ever being released in Spain. What’s more, we could say that it passed into the realm of the oblivion of dusty negatives until, in 2020, thanks to an agreement with Filmoteca Española, it was digitised and remastered from the original image negatives and some of its sound elements have been replaced by new additions because, as its director explained: «There were some little tunes in the background that nobody really knew what they were doing there and, for that reason, we have replaced them. However, we didn’t want to change the volume of the dialogue. They were fine as they were». Vicente Molina Foix: «I saw the film for the first time yesterday; I thought it was destroyed. I only had the memory of a photograph that was published in a French magazine». Starring such important names in our culture as Vicente Molina-Foix, Concha Romero and Adolfo Arrieta, the film travels back in time to become one of the key titles if we want to understand the circumstances of what was once called marginal or underground cinema.

_{Augusto M. Torres, director of La mano de madera, y Vicente Molina Foix, together with Roger Koza}

Two brothers, a wheelchair, uncoupled dialogues, outbursts, antonymous shots, dreams, crucifixes, a storm and something locked in a room to star in one of the most indefinable proposals of the 61st FICX. Everything is groundbreaking and different; risky and wild. As Augusto M. Torres himself confessed during the colloquium: «The film had nothing to do with what was being done at the time, nor with what is being done now. Everything has happened to it, so I have no idea what will happen to it from now on». Nothing more to add.