Just days before they were to pick him up, a military uprising cut Segovia off from the Republican part of Spain and Luis found himself trapped in the menacing environment of his mother's Nationalist relatives for the duration of the war.

After saying goodbye to his adult relatives, he goes for a bike ride with Angélica's daughter, which triggers his memory of his thwarted escape with his cousin through Nationalist lines in an effort to rejoin his parents.

Building on that allusion, Saura and writer Rafael Azcona developed a script about the childhood memories of a man now in his mid forties and his flirtatious cousin, Angélica, on whom he had a crush when he was ten years old.

[3] The film is told as a labyrinthine montage of recreated memories that surface in the waking consciousness of the vanquished past that the protagonist cannot bring himself to confront.

A character who will continuously and seamlessly move form one period of time to another without resorting to the habitual flashback, but rather showing a past which is constantly being recaptured and lived as a present.

The idea for this came from a phrase from Ramón del Valle-Inclán : " Things are not as we see them, but as we remember them "[2] Saura described Luis, the main character in the film a someone who was profoundly touched by the Civil War.

[4] The theme of interdicted history, the Spanish Civil War years as remembered by a child of Republican parents, Saura confronted the censors.

The film's sense of liberation comes from its directness in depicting a number of scenes in which the Nationalist cause is either ridiculed or presented as inspired more by petty animosity than by patriotic or religious fervor.

[6] Though never officially banned, the film posed a risk to theater owners fearful of repetitions of the incidents that hampered the Madrid and Barcelona showings.

Despite the climate of hostility that surrounded it, fueled by the notoriety of the scandal, La prima Angélica was Querejeta and Saura's first formidable box office success, grossing eighty million pesetas by the end of 1975.

The Spanish conservative press attacked the award as part of a foreign conspiracy against Spain's honor by praising the detractors of the heroic struggle for National liberation.

The producer, Elías Querejeta, was pressured to make some cuts, in particular to a scene in which a character who breaks his arm has it set in plaster in a fascist salute.