Showing posts with label Costa da morte. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Costa da morte. Show all posts

Tuesday 12 May 2015

Iberodocs 2015


    My coverage of the D'A Festival is still ongoing (see my previous post), but the 2nd edition of Iberodocs starts this week in Scotland - it takes place in Edinburgh from this Thursday and moves to Glasgow the following weekend. I've written a preview for Eye for Film, which you can read here
    If you're able to go to either weekend, I can recommend Vikingland (dir. Xurxo Chirro), Arraianos (dir. Eloy Enciso), and La plaga / The Plague (dir. Neus Ballús) - plus, Arraianos is screening with Lois Patiño's short film Montaña en sombra, which I found breathtaking when I saw it in Bradford last year alongside Patiño's Costa da Morte (my favourite film last year, as if you need reminding). I'll be reviewing some of the films showing at Iberodocs over the coming fortnight, and I also have an interview with Xurxo Chirro about how Vikingland came to be and what New Galician Cinema is all about. I will post the links on here as and when they exist.

Tuesday 23 December 2014

My Favourite Spanish Films of 2014, Part Two: New

The first part of my 2014 round-up - 'Old, but new to me' - can be found here.

With my end of year lists on here I count the current year and the previous as 'new' (so in this instance - 2013 and 2014) because I generally see Spanish films on DVD (the year following their initial release in Spain). Unusually this year I'm able to include several films that I've seen in a cinema because I started attending film festivals - two of them (Viva in Manchester and the new Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival) specialise in Spanish cinema, but three others (Bradford, Edinburgh, and Leeds) also included Spanish films in their programme. I've not seen any Spanish films on general release in the UK in 2014. Obviously in terms of films released in Spain in 2014, I've only seen a few - I'm particularly looking forward to catching up with Magical Girl (dir. Carlos Vermut), La Isla Mínima / Marshland (dir. Alberto Rodríguez), Carmina y amén (dir. Paco León), Hermosa juventud / Beautiful Youth (dir. Jaime Rosales), Negociador / Negotiator (dir. Borja Cobeaga), and No todo es vigilia / Not All Is Vigil (dir. Hermes Paralluelo) in 2015.




1. Costa da Morte / Coast of Death (Lois Patiño, 2013)
I saw Patiño's feature debut at the Bradford International Film Festival in April (I reviewed it here - it's the only film I've given 5 stars to this year - and also wrote about it over at Mediático in the context of the other Spanish films shown in Bradford) and it is my overall favourite film of the year (with or without the 'Spanish' qualifier*). Part of its impact on me was definitely due to the context in which I saw it - on the Media Museum's IMAX screen (although not in IMAX format), sat on my own and approximately level with the centre of the image. It felt a bit like I was suspended over this immense landscape (and seascape). It is one of the most absorbing and visually overwhelming films I have seen in a cinema, and eight months later some of the images - a tree falling through the fog, the smoke from an extinguished fire blooming across the screen - are still flittering through my mind. I actually like it so much that I'm not sure I would watch it again unless I could see it on the big screen - so I may have to be content with having seen it once (not least because it isn't currently available). Bonus: I recently found this interview with Patiño about the film at Cinema Scope.




2. El Futuro / The Future (Luis López Carrasco, 2013)
Another film seen at the Bradford Film Festival (and included in the Mediático essay). A house party in the aftermath of the 1982 Socialist victory, before the dream went sour, with the generation who mistook the 1982 election for an end in and of itself rather than the start of something. The film is a mood piece rather than a narrative, and utilises the discombobulating effect of unsynchronised sound (so what you see is not what you're listening to) to put the viewer in amongst the hustle and bustle of the party. It also has one of the most earworm-tastic soundtracks of the year - I still had this one reverberating through my head more than a week later (the 1st thing I wrote down when I came out of the cinema was "Deserted ruins and beautiful swimming pools/ Dried out women with vampiric voices") - with the lyrics (which unusually are subtitled) lingering in the mind for far longer than the disjointed conversations we eavesdrop on. The director's thoughts on his choice of soundtrack (and videos of the songs themselves) can be found here. Another one that hasn't been released in home viewing form.




3. Todos están muertos / They're All Dead (Beatriz Sanchís, 2014)
One half of 1980s sibling pop duo Groenlandia [Greenland], Lupe (Elena Anaya) nows lives as a recluse in suburban Madrid and is reliant on her mother Paquita (Angélica Aragón) to bring up the teenage son (Pancho - played by Cristian Bernal) who quietly despises her. The superstitious Paquita finally resorts to desperate measures to try to restore her daughter to something of her former self - she takes the opportunity of the Mexican Day of the Dead to try to invoke the absent member of their family, seemingly to no avail. But unbeknownst to everyone else, Lupe can now see her missing other half - her brother Diego (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) who died fifteen years earlier. That sounds like the set up for a comedy (and the film does have its moments of humour with the ghostly situation), but it is a drama centring on an astounding performance by Elena Anaya. Lupe is a woman who seems to have no form of psychological protection, as if her nerve endings are exposed and every bit of social interaction is physically painful - it's a role that could become a catalogue of tics, but (without wishing to sound too wankerish) Anaya's performance is about being rather than doing: Lupe's fragility is made tangible with great subtlety, and Anaya walks the high wire without a safety net and in a state of grace. The Spanish DVD has optional English subs.




4. La distancia / The Distance (Sergio Caballero, 2014)
Telepathic Russian dwarves + a haiku reciting bucket (in love with a nearby chimney) = enjoyably bonkers. A team of three Russian dwarves receive mysterious instructions requesting their presence at an old Soviet power plant in Siberia where a performance artist (mathematics and dead rabbits seem to be the tools of his trade) is imprisoned in the plant warehouse according to the wishes of the now-dead power magnate who 'bought' him. The mcguffin is that the artist wants them to steal 'La distancia' - an unspecified object - from the abandoned power plant next door. What follows is the planning of the heist over the course of a week, complete with telekinesis, teleportation, more dead rabbits, and some kinky goings-on. This is laced with the same daft and absurd humour as Caballero's Finisterrae - although this film feels more polished, with a sophisticatedly layered soundscape and starkly beautiful widescreen visuals - and has an ending so WTF-abrupt that it made me laugh out loud. The Spanish DVD/Blu Dual Pack (the only format it's available in - the dual packs are something of an unfortunate trend in the Spanish market at the moment) has optional English subs (which you will no doubt need, given that the film is in Russian).




5. 10,000 Km (Carlos Marques-Marcet, 2014)
A simple two-hander with the complication that the two leads are not in the same geographical space after the opening sequence - for most of the running time, each actor (Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer) is effectively delivering a series of dramatic monologues (they are talking to a computer screen but it is often delivered straight to camera, as if talking to the viewer), and yet a palpable connection is made and maintained between the couple. A moving - and in at least one scene, excruciatingly embarrassing (deliberately) - rendering of a long distance relationship, with the possibility that sometimes you are never further apart than when you're in the same room with someone. I reviewed it here. The Spanish DVD has optional English subs.




6. Edificio España / The Building (Víctor Moreno, 2013)
By chance Víctor Moreno captured not just the deconstruction of an iconic Madrid landmark (and Francoist symbol), but also the moments leading up to the housing / property bubble bursting - effectively the opening of an economic sinkhole that Spain has yet to climb back out of. But Edificio España (an interesting space quite apart from its iconicity) and its suspended renovation are more than a metaphor for the current times, and the director finds a human side (the collateral damage in the banks' games) both in the meeting with its last resident and the multitude of nationalities doing the back-breaking labour. I wrote quite a long post about it in October. Available on VOD in Spain (at Filmin) but not currently available in other formats. UPDATE (13/03/15): it is now available on DVD (with optional English subs) in Spain. 




7. Los ilusos / The Wishful Thinkers (Jonás Trueba, 2013)
Seen at the inaugural Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival in early October (trailer here), my initial reaction to Jonás Trueba's second film was that it was a bit too clever for its own good. The audience I saw it with resisted it for at least the first twenty minutes (to the extent that I sat there wondering whether it might have been preferable to watch it at home undistracted by other people fidgeting - it was (and I discovered last night, still is) available on Curzon on Demand) - the visible filmmaking (e.g. clapperboards, visible crew, actors having to repeat dialogue for sound recording clarity) and occasionally unsynchronised sound proving hard going for some, but it picks up momentum to carry you along, and it has grown on me as I've thought about it in the time since. If I have time, I intend to rewatch it over Christmas. This black and white (filmed on 16mm), breezily romantic film about twenty-somethings in Madrid (the central character is screenwriter Leon (Francesco Carril), and we also meet his actor flatmate Bruno (Vito Sanz), friend Lilian (Isabelle Stoffel), and romantic interest Sofia (Aura Garrido)) pursing cinematic dreams and living in the in-between spaces of the city, also has several sequences that made me laugh out loud - a shaggy dog-like tale (possibly half imagined) about Bruno pursuing the director Javier Rebollo that becomes increasingly hysteria-inducing through repetition, and Leon interrupting a date at the cinema in order to question a projectionist about the quality of the print ("It's Blu-Ray" he's told to his considerable consternation) being cases in point. It is radically different to Trueba's first film (Todos las canciones hablan de mí / All the Songs Are About Me (2010) - which I really liked), so I'm interested to see where he goes with his third - Los exiliados románticos / The Romantic Exiles (which again stars Sanz, Carril, and Stoffel, and seems to be in post-production).




8. La plaga / The Plague Year (Neus Ballús, 2013)
Nominated in the Best New Director category at this year's Goya Awards (she lost to Fernando Franco (La herida / Wounded)), Neus Ballús made her feature debut with a film that falls between narrative fiction and documentary - she had spent a number of years talking to inhabitants in the area depicted, getting to know them and their stories, and the people onscreen are playing a version of themselves (they are all non-professionals). The visuals are Instagram-like (which I found challenging for the first ten minutes or so - although the faded look suits the parched heat of the location) but there is something more interesting going on in the hardscrabble existences of those trying to live and work in this in-between space (on the outskirts of Barcelona). These are people pushed to the edges of their endurance in order to survive in the current economic climate, and who can fall through the cracks without a trace (immigrants - some of whom are unable to find the permanent work required to obtain residency - the elderly, the struggling small rural businesses, and the just generally struggling). The Spanish DVD has optional English subs.




9. En tierra extraña / In a Foreign Land (Icíar Bollaín, 2014)
I wrote about it here. I find certain aspects of Bollaín's documentary - namely the glove thing - slightly twee but she gives a voice to people currently without one in their own country (because of their absence due to the economic situation), and it's an admirably angry film (and someone needs to be). I saw it at the Edinburgh Filmhouse as part of the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival in an audience that was at least 80% Spanish - the majority of whom presumably in similar circumstances to those interviewed onscreen - which made it a participatory event: boos, hisses and catcalls greeted news footage of wilfully disingenuous Spanish politicians, gasps were audible as certain stories were relayed, and laughter was shared over the collective dismay at the Scottish weather. As I said in my previous post, given the poisonous invective on immigration that is currently being regurgitated with little challenge in the UK, Bollaín's film should be shown far and wide. Not currently available in the UK although it is on various VOD platforms in Spain (including Filmin) and has received several further cinema screenings in Scotland.  




10. Stella cadente / Falling Star (Lluís Miñarro, 2014)
Another film seen in Edinburgh, but this one was at the Edinburgh Film Festival back in June. I wasn't bowled over by it at the time - I felt it was just too much of everything - but would like to see it again, not least because I was unwell on the day I saw it. It is a visually ravishing and enjoyably theatrical film with a spritely sense of humour and a wonderful central performance by Àlex Brendemühl. It has made my top 10 - despite receiving a lower star rating than some of the other films I've reviewed this year (included in the 'honourable mention' section) - because "Set these rabbits free!" is my favourite subtitle of the year. I reviewed it here. The Spanish DVD has optional English subs.


Honourable mentions (alphabetical) [links take you to what I've written about them]:
Arraianos (Eloy Enciso, 2013), Cenizas (Carlos Balbuena, 2013), Con la pata quebrada / Barefoot and in the Kitchen (Diego Galán, 2013), Ocho apellidos vascos / Spanish Affair (Emilio Martínez Lazáro, 2014), Todas las mujeres / All the Women (Mariano Barroso, 2013), Tots volem el millor per a ella / We All Want What's Best For Her (Mar Coll, 2013) Un ramo de cactus / A Bouquet of Cactus (Pablo Llorca, 2013).


Favourite performances:
Elena Anaya (Todos están muertos)
Àlex Brendemühl (Stella cadente
Alberto San Juan (En tierra extraña)
Nora Navas (Tots volem el millor per a ella
Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer (10,000 Km
Eduard Fernández (Todas las mujeres)


*For the record (and to give a bit of context), my overall 11 favourite films seen in a cinema this year: 
1. Costa da Morte (dir. Lois Patiño) 
2. Blue Ruin (dir. Jeremy Saulnier) 
3. Ida (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski)
4. Winter Sleep (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
5. Journey to the West (dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
6. The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson)
7. El Futuro (dir. Luis López Carrasco)
8. Starred Up (dir. David Mackenzie)
9. Mr Turner (dir. Mike Leigh)
= Refugiado (dir. Diego Lerman)
= Stray Dogs (dir. Tsai Ming-liang)

Monday 14 April 2014

Bradford International Film Festival: The 'Other' Spanish Cinema

El futuro

    The 20th edition of the Bradford International Film Festival ran between the 27th March and 6th April 2014 at the National Media Museum with a diverse programme of films from around the world, including retrospectives of James Benning, Brian Cox, and Sally Potter, and Close-Up sections on producer/distributor Charles Urban, and the crime films of Yoshitarõ Nomura. I managed to catch a bit of (almost) everything but had timed my visit specifically to see the three Spanish films playing at the festival: Un ramo de cactus / A Bouquet of Cactus (Pablo Llorca, 2013), El futuro / The Future (Luis López Carrasco, 2013), and Costa da Morte / Coast of Death (Lois Patiño, 2013).  
   You can read the rest of my report on the 'other' Spanish cinema that screened in Bradford over at Mediático.

    I am intending to write about all three films here as well, probably starting with Luis López Carrasco's film (it's 67 minutes long, but I only scratched the surface in that report) at some point in the next couple of weeks.

Tuesday 8 April 2014

Costa da Morte / Coast of Death (Lois Patiño, 2013)

Costa da Morte
At the end of last week I headed to the 20th edition of the Bradford International Film Festival for a few days, namely to see the three Spanish films that were screening - El futuro / The Future (Luis López Carrasco, 2013), Costa da Morte / Coast of Death (Lois Patiño, 2013), and Un ramo de cactus / A Bouquet of Cactus (Pablo Llorca, 2013) - although I saw quite a range of films while I was there.
A post about all three Spanish films will appear at Mediático next week but in the meantime I have reviewed my favourite, Costa da Morte, for Eye for Film.

Wednesday 20 November 2013

Guest Post: Michael Pattison - Notes on Some Spanish Films at the Seville European Film Festival

     Though their country’s economic plight worsens daily, Spanish filmmakers are beginning to assess and get to grips with a political climate that is, in the final analysis, antagonistic to artistic endeavour. While films ineluctably express the complex, contradictory tensions that characterise the social context in which they are made, the aim and hope is that any historical period finds its artistic match: those works that grasp the matter at hand, embrace the difficulties ahead, and refuse to evade the work to be done. To this end, there were a significant number of Spanish films at the tenth Seville European Film Festival (SEFF) whose general focus and political persuasion spoke of a palpable discontent with regard to the current state of things. Not every film will be politically charged, of course, and so it is to SEFF’s credit that it waded through what I presume to be a large swamp of mediocrity in order to present, by and large, the strong selection it finally offered. These works speak to the present precisely because they convey an understanding – to varying degrees – of how they relate to the unfolding historical moment.

Costa da morte / Coast of Death
     I have written elsewhere here and here   on Lois Patiño’s Costa da Morte, but some further remarks won’t go amiss (I first saw the film in Locarno in August, and again at the Viennale prior to my arrival in Seville). An essay film on the eponymous Galician coastline – named so because of its history of shipwrecks – Patiño’s debut feature frequently surveys its region from afar, zoomed-in so as to flatten its landscapes and thereby deny a more visually harmonious vantage point. There’s something unnatural about such optical choices: as humans, we cannot, after all, get a closer look at an object without telescopic aid or without physically moving to a closer proximity. Consequently, the film enables an unspoken but ongoing commentary on its own function: in denying itself and its audience a postcard-friendly view of the Coast of Death, it suggests a better understanding of these locales might come from a more idiosyncratic view. By flattening the landscape in such a way, Patiño’s film pits a multiplicity of histories against one another, privileging none and including all. Just as every landscape is the sum of its parts, so the present is the sum of its pasts. Note the plural: at no point in history has there been a moment without contradictions – the remnants of a bygone time, the formations of an era to come. 

El Futuro / The Future
     El Futuro takes an aesthetically different approach to history. Set in the immediate aftermath of Spain’s 1982 General Election – which was won by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party – Luis López Carrasco’s debut feature confines itself to a house party attended by a group of increasingly inebriated twenty- and thirty-somethings hell-bent on indulging the post-Franco night away. When I saw the film at Locarno in August I couldn’t write the soundtrack list in its end credits down fast enough: this boasts an infectious selection of the Euro-synth and -punk of the period, and lends the narrative a real verve. There’s something futuristic about electronic music, of course, and yet ’80s synth – as well as other fashions from that decade – seems to have dated quicker than most. Likewise, the forward-thinking euphoria facilitated by a socialist party’s assumption of governmental responsibilities now seems a distant memory: López Carrasco’s ironically-named film is anything but optimistic, and the textured grain of his 16mm compositions reminds us at every turn of its own retrospection. Every smile, laugh and suggestion of a future appears as a ghost prohibited today by Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy’s enforced austerity.

El triste olor de la carne / The Sad Smell of Flesh
    Mariano Rajoy is a secondary character in El triste olor de la carne, the second feature by Cristóbal Arteaga Roza. Having his first state-of-the-nation address in February this year overheard in intermittent snippets here recalls Andrew Dominik’s similar employment of Barack Obama soundbites in Killing Them Softly (2012). Unlike that film, however, El triste olor de la carne has no time for allegory: a single-take trudge through Madrid’s urban sprawl, it takes one citizen’s financial loss to its logical, literal and inevitable (if no less powerful) conclusion. Said citizen is Alfredo (Alfredo Rodríguez), an uncanny cross between Boris Karloff and Peter Capaldi, his visibly fatigued face saying more than the character ever does, as he tries desperately to defer a meeting with the bailiffs who are coming to repossess his home.
     When a recession begins to affect the perfect image of a white middle-class nuclear family, you know you’re in trouble. Alfredo’s burnt-out businessman is a figure of belated if bewildered acceptance, and the only resistance he can summon rings, in the end, all too true. Though some critics might feel its persistent, unbroken take results in unnecessary bouts of dead time – such as when Alfredo is driving, or else travelling on a bus or in a taxi – this is precisely the film’s strength, lingering as it does on those unbearably long passages in which unthinkable stress drains a person’s life away. Indeed, the prospect of financial collapse is now too familiar a prospect for many Spanish people that contrived dramatics are no longer necessary.

Alegrías de Cádiz / Joys of Cádiz
     Not every Spanish film at SEFF felt like it was making a significant contribution to the battle. Gonzalo García Pelayo’s Alegrías de Cádiz returns its director to filmmaking after three decades in other fields, and feels very much the product of someone lacking practice. (For a serviceably flashy take on García Pelayo’s venture into professional gambling in the 1990s, see Eduard Cortés’s The Pelayos (2012)). Anyone familiar with the director’s work – pseudo-cerebral, flesh-heavy forays into the beauty of women, the joys of sex, monogamy as a socially conditioned and therefore unnatural state, and so on – will not be surprised to hear this is a heavily indulgent work. Not without its lively moments, the film is an uneasy blend of a meta-comedy about a ménage-à-trois and a sincere essay film on Cádiz. As such, it keeps itself busy for its two-hour running time, but García Pelayo’s implication-cum-assertion, that the most interesting thing about a city is its women, seems like a perverted joke.

10.000 noches en ninguna parte / 10,000 Nights Nowhere
     Other films disappointed. 10.000 noches en ninguna parte, by Malaga-born writer-director Ramón Salazar, is a centrifugal triptych on themes of loss and – of course – love. Wide-eyed Andrés Gertrúdix plays the same character thrice, living in parallel dimensions: with a bohemian trio in Berlin, with a childhood love in Paris, and with his alcoholic mother in what I presumed to be Spain. A dull, cold visual palette – with shallow-focus camerawork – gives the film a terminally malaised look, and though a certain whimsicality forces its earlier passages along, the employment of Arvo Pärt’s overused ‘Fratres’ reveals an essentially juvenile sensibility at work. Indeed, at a certain point during the film I wrote in my notebook: these people don’t live in the same world as me – the real world, with financial pressures etc

Los chicos del puerto / The Kids from the Port
     Nor do the protagonists of Los chicos del puerto, by Alberto Morais. The film’s eponymous port is that of Valencia, and its kids are Miguel, Lola and Guillermo, three pre-teens who embark upon the ostensibly simple trek to a cemetery, to place an army jacket on the grave of the recently deceased friend of Miguel’s grandfather. The pilgrimage of course turns out to be more arduous than first assumed. The friends underestimate their bus fare; they journey to the wrong cemetery; they become lost; they grow hungry; they go broke. That one-note tone of dramatic seriousness – more familiar to French productions than to Spanish – sets in quickly: characters act not how people do, but for a desired symbolism, one which over the course of even a slim 78 minutes drains all would-be energy. Programme notes mention “sparse dialogue and a formal Bressonian minimalism”, but the invariably stilted interactions here are part of a wider filmmaking trend that may very well be indebted to Bresson but which provides too little social commentary to justify the comparison. Too many filmmakers seem to mistake this sullen, ploddingly mopey register for mysteriousness, for ambiguity, for poetry or for purity – or for any other apparently desirable trait.
     All the more refreshing, then, to watch more upbeat films like El Rayo, Un ramo de cactus and Las aventuras de Lily ojos de gato. The first of these, directed by Fran Araúgo and Ernesto de Nova, screened in SEFF’s ‘Andalusian Panorama’ section following a world-premiere at San Sebastian, and sees a defiantly high-spirited itinerant labourer trekking across Spain back to Morocco on a tractor. The second, which received its world-premiere at SEFF as part of the festival’s inaugural ‘Resistances’ strand, is a pleasing if sometimes technically amateurish comedy by Pablo Llorca, featuring a deceptively masterful central performance from Seville-born Pedro Casablanc, who has in recent years been ubiquitous on Spanish television. Casablanc’s deadpan style and pockmarked face recall Bill Murray, and his turn in Llorca’s film – as a fiftyish farmer at odds with his family’s acceptingly money-oriented ways – deserves much wider recognition. In contrast to a film like Los chicos del puerto, both Un ramo de cactus and El Rayo demonstrate that a serious film need not be glum.

Las aventuras de Lily ojos de gato / The Adventures of Lily Cat Eyes
     Las aventuras, meanwhile, is a night-in-the-life-of tale centring heavily on inebriation as a means to forget. Working as a PR for a bar in Madrid, Lily (Ana Adams) meets a bleary-eyed customer with whom, after hours, she solemnly swears to drink till she hits the ground – and perhaps would if real-life events didn’t get in the way. To be sure, Lily is drinking away the hurt of a break-up, but her temporary escape is frustrated by more pressing matters: a friend’s pregnancy, her new pal’s paralytic state, an abusive employer, and so on. A more systemic understanding of things might be beyond Boix and his film; I would have preferred a less cartoonishly cruel boss, for instance. And though these are palpably more universal features with which to pepper a story – as opposed to the characteristics of the Galician landscape, or the political fate of Spain – the film nevertheless has an undeniable strength, in taking an otherwise insufferable young drunk and accounting for her self-destructive behaviour in a non-evasive way. Played by British actress Adams – who speaks Spanish fluently – Lily has a rugged, get-on-with-it edge, which makes her charming even when she’s actively derailing a blues performer’s final song in a late-night bar.


Michael Pattison is a freelance film critic based in Gateshead, UK. He blogs at idFilm and Tweets @m_pattison.