Picture this: a movie about three young film students - a devastatingly handsome psychopath, a grunge slasher-flick connoisseur and a thesis-writer investigating snuff movies. The thesis writer befriends the slasher-flick guy and they sneak around after dark in the hallways of their university digging up snuff movies and dirt about related missing students in scenes replete with Psycho-caliber scary music, terror-inducing tension shots and witty repartee.

The thesis writer eventually finds herself gagged, tied to a chair and looking down the barrel of a gun in of one of these snuff movies, directed by her advisor, it turns out, and perpetrated by the handsome psychopath about whom she was dreaming.

This movie, entitled “Thesis,” launched the careers of its three young actors, jetted its 23-year-old director and screenwriter to stardom and won awards for Best Film, Best New Director and Best Original Screenplay. The question is: why haven’t you seen it?

The answer: because it’s Spanish. “Tesis,” released in 1996,was undoubtedly one of the best movies to come out of Spain in the last fifteen years. The director, Alejandro Almenábar, wrote it while finishing film school in Madrid, cast some of his actor buddies and became an overnight sensation, joining the ranks of some of Spain’s best directors: Pilar Miró, Carlos Saura, Pedro Almodóvar . . . “Who?” you ask. Exactly.

For the past five years, the Spanish film industry has been making waves in Europe, experiencing a renaissance not seen since the days of avant-garde Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel in the 1930’s (a friend of artist Salvador Dalí and writer Federico García Lorca). This amazing turnaround in the world of Spanish movies has allowed directors, actors and screenwriters - like Almenábar and his gang - to blossom, and has sent the serious Spanish movie-goers, people who deserted Spanish cinema in the ‘70s and much of the ‘80s for lack of anything decent to see, flooding back into movie theaters. The funny thing is, no one in the United States seems to care. What is it about Spanish cinema and the American market that just don’t seem to gel?

Spanish.

First of all, there’s the language problem. Spanish people, even in the movies, speak Spanish. While there are certainly numerous art cinemas in the United States showing European films (even more as you reach either coast)they are dwarfed immensely by Multiplexes and first run movie theaters. Spain has the same problem. Their off-beat art theaters are the ones showing Spanish movies, while the movies showing at their mainstream theaters are 80% American films dubbed into Spanish.

Spain’s dubbing industry is actually one of the best in the world; even movies distributed in Latin America are dubbed in Spain. Still, art houses in Spain are the only places to see subtitled original version films, but these theaters are as lacking in Spain as they are in the US. Hollywood has been a problem for the Spanish film industry for decades: first the US-made movies that were too naughty for dictatorship-run Spain, and the censors callously painted vests onto boxer’s naked torsos and skewed lovers into siblings. Then, once Spain became a democracy in the 1970’s, American movies began simply to overrun Spanish ones.

Despite numerous laws and regulations requiring a certain percentage of movies distributed in Spain to be Spanish and sponsoring government underwriting of the Spanish film industry, it only takes a quick trip to a Madrid cine to see that out of nine movies showing, seven of them are American, one is British and one is Spanish. Most Spaniards, however, are not swayed by these numbers. In fact, the majority of the Spanish public likes to see American movies (minus, perhaps, patriotic eye-rollers like “Independence Day”), follow the love-lives of American actors and run to the video store for their coveted tapes of “Titanic,” just like people do around here. On the other side of the pond, when was the last time you saw a foreign movie playing at a Multiplex? OK, sure, “The Full Monty.”

But a movie that’s not in English? Forget it. Americans have the same hang-up as Spaniards: they like to see films in their own language, with actors they recognize and plots that aren’t “arty.” The two Spanish films that have broken into the American market can perhaps be labeled as flukes, despite being extraordinarily good movies: “Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios” (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”), Pedro Almodóvar’s most internationally famous film, and “Belle Époque” (“The Beautiful Period”). These two films, according to any high school Spanish student, are representative of Spanish cinema in the US. Indeed, for a time in the ‘80s, Almodóvar was an international celebrity, well known outside of Spain for his splashy, post-modern films portraying the “new” fun-loving, crazy sexy party lifestyle of Spain.

But ten years later, films like “Tesis,” this year’s amazing film “Los amantes del círculo polar” and Spain’s best film of 1997, “Secretos del corazón,” are as recognized in America as the Spanish royal family. These films would appeal immediately to an American audience not only as well-made movies but also as movies with American-style plot lines and cinematography, yet in most cases they don’t make it to a theater near you. Often, they don’t even make it to a video store near you. What’s the problem?

Who are these people?

Antonio Banderas. Name one other Spanish film star. Didn’t think so. The second major problem Spanish film poses to the American public is that most people don’t know who the actors and directors are. Antonio Banderas is an interesting case history. Banderas was introduced to the American public through his roles in Almodóvar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (“¡Átame!”), both released in the United States. These movies were only two out of Banderas’ extensive filmography in Spain, but they helped launch him into an American film career that has allowed him to leave Spain in his dust.

While Banderas has made plenty of clunkers in the US (“Two Much” comes to mind), he has two things going for him: Melanie Griffith and English. Melanie, as known and despised in Spain as here, was one of Banderas’ tickets into Hollywood, and his drive and ability to learn English was the other. Carmelo Gómez, a talented Spanish actor who with his rugged, Mediterranean good looks could make it in the US in a second, will never let it happen. He says: “I don’t get along with English. . . . What I’m not going to learn is the language of some guys who impose upon me to tell the stories that they want. This is my market, this is my country. I want to tell what happens here and in my language.”

While Banderas and a few other Spanish actors are tripping over themselves to leave Spain, Goméz, by leaving English behind, has settled definitively into the Spanish film market. Banderas has left his homeland’s market behind just as definitively by speaking English. At the recent premiere of “Zorro” in Madrid invited guests included Banderas, Griffith, Almodóvar and the King and Queen of Spain, demonstrating by their presence just what an important export Banderas is for Spain. But Spanish audiences have begun to doubt that Banderas still even represents their country: In the dubbed versions of “Zorro,” Spanish audiences who have, in effect, fueled his international stardom by paying to see (and hear) him in countless pictures, were treated to another man’s voice dubbed over Banderas’ Spanish-accent tinged English.

Banderas aside, there are other Spanish actors who have made it to the outside (though to recognize their names one must have a working knowledge of every Spanish film released in the US): Javier Bardem (“Jamón, Jamón”), Jorge Sanz (“Belle Époque”) and Carmen Maura (“Alice and Martin,” a French film and virtually every film by Almodóvar), but there are many who have been left behind. The hunky star of “Tesis” and Almenábar’s second film, “Abre los ojos” (“Open Your Eyes”), Eduardo Noriega, also has the capacity to launch a career in the US. However, instead of being simply released in the States, the rights to “Open Your Eyes” have been purchased by Tom Cruise, who will play the lead role in an American remake, effectively ripping the American Visa right out of Noriega’s hands.

So you want to see a Spanish movie...

All things being equal, the easiest solution to Spain’s film woes abroad is to send us more movies! If you show them, people will see them, right? The obstacle, in one word, is distribution. José Carlos Gallardo, a Ph.D. film student in Madrid and connoisseur of both Spanish and American movies, says the problems lies in dinero. “The more money a producer has, the easier it is to gain access to international markets,” Gallardo says. “The quality of a film has nothing to do with it” because even if a small film in Spain is successful and therefore merits being seen abroad, it doesn’t have the money or the distributor to be released in the United States. This, despite the fact that, as Gallardo says, “you can tell in the change of faces, the new scripts and the new stories,” that Spanish cinema is experiencing a dramatic improvement. The former president of the Spanish Academy of Cinematic Arts and Sciences, José Luis Borau, reiterates this point, saying: “[Spanish film] has left the agony toward a kind of Springtime. Every year there are more successes than before.”

And the American film industry? Borau says that it’s the only “serious industry that exists in the film world. . . . Serious from the industrial point of view, because artistically and creatively it’s a horror. To see what they’re doing with what they have is really scandalous.” Spain, with maybe an eighth of the money the United States film industry posses, is really trying. But without distributors, international success stories are simply impossible.

Another factor that sways distributors are the films nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film. Each year, countries are allowed to nominate one picture that may or may not make it to the final five nominated for the Oscar. Films nominated have a much greater chance of finding an American distributor than all the other foreign films made each year. This year, the Spanish Academy nominated a film that’s sure to lose, “El abuelo” (“The Grandfather”), a pure literary movie that bogs itself down for the first hour before escaping to excellence in the last hour. It’ll never get here because Britain and the United States make enough of these movies for everyone. Another film, however, “Los amantes del círculo polar” (“The Polar Circle Lovers”) deserved to be nominated, and had the capacity to have won a coveted spot. It’s a quirky, cinematographically brilliant, unusual and touching love story that, like “Tesis,” would capture American audiences immediately. “The Polar Circle Lovers,” amazingly enough, has secured a distributor, so, cross your fingers and it might reach a screen in New York City.

Until then, the fame in Spain falls mainly on the plane: that is, buy yourself a ticket to Madrid to catch the good Spanish directors, actors and movies. Until the far-off day when the movie industry becomes a world market, instead of an American market, enjoying good Spanish films in movie theaters in the United States is little more than a utopian vision.