The Spanish actor Buenaventura Ibáñez began his professional career as a pantomime performer. After his activity was extended during the golden years of silent cinema, basically in Italy, but it had been finished with the arrived of talking cinema.
Based on the documentation that his family has kept, this documentary reconstructs the biography of the Spanish actor Bonaventura Ibáñez, who began his professional career as a pantomime performer in the last decade of the 19th century. In 1892 he formed his own company with his brothers and other mimes, playing the character of Pierrot both in Barcelona and in France until 1909. The crisis of the pantomime show led him to move to Turin, where he began in his new role as cinematographic actor. Working under the direction of directors such as the Italians Giovanni Pastrone and Augusto Genina, the American Henry King, the Mexican Miguel Contreras, the French Henri Fescourt and the Spanish Luis Buñuel, he appeared in more than eighty films, including such significant titles as "Cabiria" (1914), "The Royal Tigress" (1916), "Romola" (1924), "The Last Lord" (1926), "Kiss Me" (1929), "Monte Cristo" (1929) or "The Golden Age" (1930). His last film was the Spanish version of "Elle veut faire du cinema" (1930), released under the title "Cinópolis" (1931). Starring Imperio Argentina, it will be one of the first sound films of Spanish cinema.Following the thread of this biography, the documentary reviews the main milestones in the history of silent films, especially in Spain, Italy and France, until the appearance of talking cinema.While some performers were able to continue their professional career or reinvent themselves successfully doing other tasks in the film industry, Ibáñez could only find work as an usher in a Barcelona movie theater. Bankrupt, he died in 1932.
