"Francisco de Goya was a painter to the royal court in Spain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. "The world is a masquerade," he observed. "All wish to appear what they are not." In his remarkable portraits he unmasked his subjects even as he pleased them. But André Malraux, the twentieth-century French writer, has commented that Goya discovered his genius only when he gave up trying to please others. Goya became ill and almost totally deaf. In his head, witches shrieked and nightmare visions unfolded, confirming horrors he witnessed in life. These Goya drew in haunting and powerful sequences. In the film, Goya's intense engravings of bullfighting scenes are accompanied by lines from Lorca's "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejias."" - Summary from the teacher's guide.