In close-shot, a bloodied bullet is submerged in a glass of water. The anguished strains of cante jondo [deep song] erupt into the surround sound. This sequence forms the opening titles of Marcos Zurinaga's 1996 film Muerte en Granada [Death in Granada], released in the US as The Disappearance of García Lorca. Hollywood actor Andy García steps into the role of the poet and playwright to recreate the circumstances surrounding Lorca's murder. The film is a noirish thriller. It features a journalist-cum-literary critic turned detective, who becomes embroiled in a plot involving the same suspects responsible for Lorca's death years earlier. In this opening scene, a series of dissolves cross-cuts footage from the Spanish Civil War with shots of García, playing Lorca, dressed in a striking white suit in a cell awaiting execution. He is reciting Lorca's famous poem Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías [Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías]: its chorus line ‘a las cinco de la tarde’ [at five in the afternoon] tolls above the orchestral crescendo. ‘[Lorca's] murder was one of the enigmas of the war,’ the credits inform us. The film acknowledges a debt to Ian Gibson's The Assassination of García Lorca and his Lorca: A Life, which underscores the importance of Gibson's biographical work in the 1970s. Knowing it would be seized on internationally, the Franco regime suppressed information about Lorca's death. Gibson not only revealed details about the murder, but also shed light on Lorca's homosexuality (an aspect that is omitted from Zurinaga's thriller).

Zurinaga's film illustrates well the ‘seductiveness’ of Lorca as icon: the patchy trail of homosexual liaisons, partially glimpsed or wholly suppressed, and the enigma of his murder, create the desire to turn detective and find out more. But the opening sequence of the film also illustrates the way that the circumstances of Lorca's death have come to influence interpretations of his work: the poem ‘Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’ deals with the death of a matador in the bullring. But in the Zurinaga film it signifies Lorca's status as martyr at the hands of Fascism, in a neat elision of oeuvre and biography, of work and life.