Direction: Ragnar Bragason
Performers: Gisli Örn Garaoarsson, Nina Dog Filippusdöttir, Ölafur Darri Ólafsson, Andri Snaer Magnasson.
BÖRN (children) is the penultimate film by Icelandic director Ragnar Bragason, which has been followed by its second part, “PARENTS”, already screened during this year. Ragnar Bragason made his debut at a film festival in 2000, year in which he was awarded the Jury Prize at the Cairo Festival and the Icelandic Cultural Prize. He got six nominations to the EDDA Prizes ( Icelandic Film Academy Prizes), from which he won two: Best Videoclip and Best TV Comedy. His script for “THE WHISPERER” was nominated to Script of the Year at Sundance Prizes/ NHK, of the year 2003. His side as videoclip and advertisement director enjoys international recognition.
The film is quite worth seeing. It’s an authentic drama, full of unfortunate characters: Karitas, a mother who takes care of her four little children: three daughters and one son without any help, and whose responsibility exceeds her; a father who looks for his son in an attempt to have a second opportunity and get out of the world of violence he’s immersed in; a mentally ill man who lives with his mother and whose only friend is Gudmund, Karitas’ son. It is a film about parents and children, no doubt, and as the name suggests, about filial relationships.
It’s a story about unhappy lives, but also of attempts to overcome unhappiness. The question it seems to pose is: is it possible to change or there comes a moment from which it is too late? Who will trust you again?People say that it’s never late when happiness is good…although I always thought it was a saying for American stories, not for European ones, which are loaded with greater pessimism. Anyway, the audience will see and judge. I would have ended the film five minutes earlier, with the close-up of the father’s face in the hospital, although it’s possible that the last 5 minutes were badly needed…we often need a mouthful of hope.
In my opinion, the final applause was well deserved.
Sara Domínguez Martín
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia
The documentary shows how, with the arrival of these new people to Mr. Vig’s life, a journey starts, which is parallel to the transformation of the castle, and it is the personal journey of realizing that he is as eaten away by loneliness and dust as the walls he wants to change now. Therefore, if he wants to open new rooms for a Monastery, he will also have to open new rooms in his life, both for the others and for himself. Mr. Vig ,in his deed, reminds us a little of Don Justo Gallego, that special character, famous in Spain for building a Cathedral in the town of Mejorada del Campo (Madrid), with rubbish. The work building, which started decades ago, is still going on, and we all could see it as an example of overcoming in an advertisement of an energetic drink.
In this film, directed by Daniele Luchetti, the political situation is the one of the Italy of the 60’s, in which the economical crisis and the recent fall of the government of Mussolini made the population to have very different views which caused a lot of confrontations. However, unlike other productions, this film shows us the daily life of the members of a family, with their personal crisis, their wishes, their passions… in short, with all ingredients necessary for the audience to identify completely with the characters. There will also be funny moments in this drama, provided almost all of them by the naïve thoughts of the young Accio and by his special way of attracting attention in a world where it seems to have arrived by chance.
played by Filipe Duarte, falls in a state of deep depression after his boyfriend’s suicide and returns to the home of his childhood for some weeks. During that time the story shows how, for our protagonist to resurrect, he will have not only to reconcile himself with his beloved’s traumatic death, but also with the death he caused to the person he had been 15 years ago, when he was heterosexual, was going to marry and had a father who accepted him. In this journey back to life he finds the help of a human being with trisomy in chromosome 21, that’s to say, with Down’s Syndrome. It’s his affectionate and pleasant nephew Vasco ( Tomas Almeida), who is 17 and whose great desire to live makes Ricardo wake up. Sometimes the “difference”, as this character demonstrates with his way of facing the world, can save us. 
The problems dragging in the couple become uncomfortable ghosts between them; Anne’s love gets stuck and turns to violence as an outlet. Georg, impassive to his wife’s abuse, makes every effort so that nothing looks like a drama.
love, destructively in love. Anna M. has the syndrome of Clerambault, what other people call ‘psychosis of the old lady’ or ‘erotic paranoia’, erotomania.
Although he began as a sports journalist, his job developed to an interest for the “problems of the common people” through the political journalism. For that reason, in 1987 he decided to interview Fidel Castro, and this interview is the one we can see opening the season Fidel tells to the Che.
The film has an easy plot, almost like a tale. It tells the story of three 30-year-old friends who spend their time sitting in a bench and have monotonous habits: drinking bear and eating cakes every days. Everything seems to be bound to be eternal until Roberto Carlos, one of them, begins to see Sunci. This is what causes a change in the lives of all them, breaking the halve-hearted balance of their lives. At that point they begin to think seriously about the future that is waiting for them in that bench.
tribute to the creative freedom, to the humour, to the irony. Domenèch Font, a cinema critic from Catalonia and professor of the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, referred, in the Seminary dedicated to Raúl Ruiz and parallel to the activities of the Seville Film Festival when talking about Ruiz´s cinema, to his “rizomatic condition” of curl and misplacement, that goes from branch to branch of a hard-to-identify-tree. For this reason, sometimes, one finds it incongruous and absurd, like Ionesco style or Becket style.
Set in Turkey in the year 1915, the film has a historic plot, but with a current look, as it tells a story which, unfortunately, seems forced to be repeated. The central axis of the film is the Armenian genocide at the hands of Turkish people. The parallel story, as it will happen in other films of the festival, is the love (the audience will have to choose which of both stories is the main one and which one the secondary). This is the first time in which a foreign director tells the story of this genocide and, as Taviani brothers assert, the Turkish Government pressured them for the film not to come into light. For this reason the film had to be shot in Bulgaria, a co-producer country. As Paolo Taviani said in an interview for the Spanish newspaper El País, “Turkey wants to come into the European Union. We don´t try to interfere in the matters of other states. However, we, as members of the EU, must ask them to recognize the Armenian genocide”.
Petunia
Sevilla Babel
Sara
Tiziano
Lola