Sevilla Babel - SPECIAL: Sevilla Festival de Cine Europeo

Family mirrors

Sevilla Babel — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:48:00 +01:00

Katia’s sister

In the relationship between brothers, some roles are played in which often the younger sets his/her mirror on the older. In the case of Lucía, the protagonist of the film, her love for her sister Katia is even stronger than her love for herself; in fact, along the whole story, whenever Lucía presents herself, she won’t mention her own name, but say "I'm Katia's sister".

Lucía is a girl not older than 12, good, responsible, quiet to the point of autism: the aim is not to disturb in a home where the fights are very common. The younger, far from being attended, is the one who attends her prostitute mother and her sister; despite her young age, she knows from cleaning the kitchen perfectly to preparing the coffee flavoured with whisky, that her mother likes when she comes back after her streetwalking. Dutch director Mijke de Jong uses the camera on the shoulder and the foreshortened figure-tracking of the little protagonist to wander around an Ámsterdam marked by prostitution and visionary preachers, tourists and immigrant grandmothers.

Sometimes, in its wandering foreshortened figure of the protagonist, it reminds us, esencially, of American director Gus Van Sant’s camera, in his work Elephant. The casting of the film is also outstanding, and reinforces the idea of the possible cause of mirror between brothers, since while Katia is a 17-year-old girl, blonde, voluptuous and pretty, Lucía is a 12-year-old teenager, chubby, with glasses and illegitimate; the mother doesn’t know who Lucía’s father is, but she does know Katia’s father’s name, who was the love of her life.

Maybe Lucía´s every gesture of attention, cleaning and excessively mature care she gives her family is to clear, almost unconsciously, that she is the “ugly duckling,” the non-prodigal daughter. Consequently, Director Jong discerns that we are marked by the invisible ins and outs of the family, which occurred even long before our birth. However, even though the film Katia´s Sister created an almost endless line at the Seville European Film Festival, so endless were the comments uttered after the viewing, some of them not very good. Like or not, at least it is a proposal.

Paola García Costas
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia

Iceland is hotting up

Sevilla Babel — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:20:00 +01:00

Sólveig Anspach brings to Seville his Back soon

With a style between carefree and poetic, hilarious and introspective, rotter and profound, Anspach tells us about Anna’s existential need for vital renovation. She is a weedy and energetic Icelandic poet who blurted to his admirer and student of her works, gems such as “You French people should speak less and fuck more”.

The fact is that Icelandic people aren’t content with watching screen versions of books at the cinema. Sólveig Anspach, whith an American father, and an Icelandic mother trained at Femis School, in Paris, is part of the current creative "boom" of Icelandic cinema, despite the fact that this Anspach’s film is the only Icelandic one we’ll be able to watch at this 5th edition of Seville Festival of European Cinema.

Back soon, which had already its premiere in August in Iceland and France, leaves us an aftertaste of vital joy, as Sigur Ròs’s songs do. Sigur Rös, the same who makes Anna (the leading character masterly played by Didda Jónsdóttir) put a Globe on the table and choose her destination with her two children, randomly . But the final decision of throwing caution to the wind won’t be free of a gruesome way in a sort of via crucis liberation. Anna knows that she needs a change, she’s tired of the life below zero in Reykjavik, but before making the decision of leaving, she has to get rid of her business as a dealer of marijuana in the middle of this story with much of road movie and hybrid comedy.

A lost-in-thought Frenchman student of general Scandinavian poetry and Anna’s poetry in particular, will be the protagonist’s companion of adventures, who will have to get around compromising situations by resorting to a cold and dry humour, and compromising situations, among them getting rid of a goose which has swallowed his mobile phone, and nobody dares to kill, a man who tries to commit suicide and is later encouraged to live by a God-believing young lady. All in all, in the same way Sigur Rós knows how to do it in music, Anspach invites us in the film to life without delay.

Concha Hierro
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia

Film Festival Kicks Off in Seville

Sevilla Babel — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:15:00 +01:00

Lights! Camera! Action! Seville's European Film Festival is rolling! The long-awaited festival finally raises its curtain, much to the delight of cinema buffs. Headed by new manager Javier Martín Domínguez, the festival is going to start with a bang. The opening film, Gomorra, by Robert Saviano, gives a gritty account of the Italian mafia and sets the scene for a very ambicious fifth festival. Apart from film (including a series of horror films especially for the night owls), we'll also have food, photography, seminars and discussions. Tickets are soon to go on sale, and they'll be available throughout the seven-day festival, so don't miss out. See you in the cinema, fellow Europeans!

Pictured: Alfredo Sánchez Monteseirín (mayor of Seville) y Bigas Luna (Spanish cinematographer)

Concha Hierro
Translated by Jessie L.

Age is nothing but a number where sexual biology is concerned

Sevilla Babel — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:38:00 +01:00

In Seventh Heaven

The human body is 70% water. With age, this percentage gradually decreases - we dehydrate, we waste away, we get older. Growing old is biological. However, it seems that society wants us to believe that from a certain age, we no longer have the right to savour or be in touch with our most intimate sexual feelings and desires.

Thanks then to directors like Andreas Dresen for his ground-breaking audiovisual offerings which manage to portray sex in later life without dogmatism. In Seventh Heaven's protagonist is a woman who is over 60 and has been married for 30 years. She falls in love with a 76-year-old man and starts an illicit affair. Dresen avoids puritan sentimental celluloid while framing the naked bodies of wrinkled, ageing people, but they're sexy all the same. An awkward encounter, hindered by stiff joints, but profound and sincere nonetheless. In an era where audiovisual images are dominated by eternal adolescents, beautiful and brilliant, no more than 35 years old, the German director offers us orgasms that are nearly octogenarian as well as the odd impotent moment.

However, the controversial commentary doesn't end there. The film's eroticism makes us wonder why a woman over 60 who has been married for 30 years doesn't have the right to fall in love again and start over. Some might say it's because she doesn't have much time left. Others might say that even if she did have time, she's not silly little girl and she has to remain true to her husband, children and grandchildren. The director gets the cogs in our brain turning again by asking if it's maybe because this woman isn't seen as anything beyond a wife, mother and grandmother who isn't entitled to live outwith those labels?

This question is what sustains the film for its duration. The interesting thing is that this woman isn't acting unconsciously - she loves both her husband and her lover and doesn't want to harm anyone. Even just the title In Seventh Heaven suggests that we don't have to wait to die in order to enjoy true paradise; perhaps paradise is living here and now without time and numbers that instill such prejudice.

Paola García Costas
Translated by Jessie L

Börn (Children)

Sevilla Babel — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:03:00 +01:00

Iceland / 2006
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 Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun

Sevilla Babel — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:05:00 +01:00

Denmark / 2007
Direction: Pernille Rose Gronkjaer
Genre: Documentary

Freud used to say that if you dreamed about a house, that house was a metaphor of what you were like, what your interior world was like. The dream of transforming a ruined castle in an orthodox Monastery may therefore define the protagonist of this loving documentary: Mr. Vig, 86 years old. For the carrying out of such dream, Mr. Vig takes the help of some nuns, and among them is sister Ambrosijae.
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.
Mr. Vig, as Don Justo, has a “spiritual” dream, a dream with “divine doors” and funny roads. The documentary, which has been screened these days in the hispalense city, was shot during several years by film maker Pernille Rose and won the 2006 prize to the best film at International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, the biggest meeting European place for documentary makers, buyers and public. The Monastery is an intimate and successful portrait of a man and, moreover, it’s about the idea o making dreams come true, which often involves to go along a road that is harder than we thought, but such difficulty means the mystery of taking a lesson not learned before, whether we are 20, 40 or 86 years old. As is Mr. Vig’s case.

Paola García Costas
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia

Il mio fratello é figlio unico (My Brother is an Only Child)

Sevilla Babel — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:41:00 +01:00

Director: Daniele Luchetti
Cast: Elio Germano (Accio), Riccardo Scamarcio (Manrico), Diane Fleri (Francesca), Angela Finocchiaro (Mrs. Benassi), Luca Zingaretti (Mario Nastri), Anna Bonaiuto (Bella), Massimo Popolizio (Benassi), Ascanio Celestini (father Cavalli), Alba Rhorwacher (Violetta)

Accio is the youngest son of a working-class Italian family who, on his own initiative, will try to fulfil himself going away from the traditions he has brought up with. After having spent some time in the seminary and having left it, he will see in the neo-fascist party the way to come out against his precarious situation. This will be the main centre of discussion through the film, as the older brother of Accio, Manrico, is a real left-wing leader in his community and he will not accept his ideology easily. Finally, they both will realize that the political tendency should not be an obstacle between them, and that thinking over and about what they are making is probably better for them.
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.

In short, Il mio fratello é figliio unico is a story that, far from trying to indoctrinate us, shows us easily two confronted viewpoints of the life, even though they have the same origins and have the same aims. It gives us the chance of thinking of the dialogue, of trying to understand attitude belonging to other people, of living together with people who, fortunately, are different to us. Maybe, and in spite of everything, the key to improve our own situation is not to face up to the world, but making a little revolution near our environment and with which we will probably get benefit faster and more directly.

María Neupavert Sánchez
Translated by Antonio Martínez Pérez

A Outra Margem (The Other Bank)

Sevilla Babel — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:34:00 +01:00

Script and Direction: Luis Filipe Rocha
Production: Paulo Branco
Music: Pedro Teixeira
Performers: Filipe Duarte and Tomas Almeida

Sometimes the distance between us and the people we love is as big as a river…that river may be the absence caused by death, that river may be the lack of communication caused by pride, that river may be the resistance to start a new life. This is the nice metaphor Luis Filipe Rocha plays with in his last film “A outra margem”, shown during the Sevilla European Film Festival’s week and which, it must be said, has filled the cinemas with people in every screening. In the film the protagonist, Ricardo, a transvestite wonderfully 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.

It’s fair to emphasize that the film is tremendously humane and fresh, the Portuguese director, who is licensed in Law, was exiled in Brazil and has dozens of works as director, scriptwriter and/or actor. He makes all the characters have to solve some enslaving conflict. Thus, in the staging as in life itself, it is clearly noticed that they relate to each other through daily objects. Such is the case, for instance, of the wedding dress that Ricardo’s ex-girlfriend gives him as reproach for the wedding that didn’t take place, or the little wooden horse that the protagonist’s father repairs and prepares in an attempt to meet his son again in solitude, because in daily life he’s not able to… his “river” of prejudices about homosexuality prevents him from doing it. It is also remarkable the soundtrack, which has allowed Pedro Teixeira Silva to transmit musically the feelings in the story.
Conformity, lack of communication in human relationships, differences…words that unfortunately draw our days and can pull us towards sadness and loneliness, but in the end, hope starts by throwing itself into the river to swim. There will always be someone like Vasco who, despite all expectations, helps you to reach the right “bank”.

Paola García Costas
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia

Gengenüber (Mistreatment)

Sevilla Babel — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:51:00 +01:00

Germany / 2007
Direction: Jam Bonny
Script: Jam Bonny and Christina Ebelt
Production: Bettina Brokemper and Andrea Hanke ( Heimafilms WDR)
Performers: Georg ( Matthias Brandt) & Anne ( Victoria Trauttmansdorff)

A SICK SOCIETY

Nothing is “normal” when Jam Bonny, Colonia’s new director, takes us with his opera prima “Mistreatment ” into the daily ins and outs of Georg and Anne’s marriage, seemingly perfect to the eyes of society. He is a policeman of half-hearted character and she is a schoolteacher who needs to give and receive affection.
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.
With a carefully studied script and a deep description of the prominent characters, Jam Bonny puts on the table the drama of a reality which is more common than it seems to be: the mistreatment of a man by a woman. The film takes violence as an axis around which the story spins, but “Mistreatment” shows the inability to communicate, the difficulty of living together, emotional dependencies, loneliness, women’s yearning for social recognition, the adjustment of middle classes and the social conventions.
The performances of Victoria Trauttmansdorff (Anne) and Matthias Brandt (Georg) are loaded with an intimate tension at the edge of emotional borders which incites the spectator to approach the characters without judging them as either victims or victimizers. The film director himself assured in a press conference that he doesn’t intend to make such a distinction.
“To distinguish between victim and victimizer is an evil method if one seeks to understand what is really going on”. It’s about “two people who spin on themselves, alone with their horror and their desire”.

Concha Hierro
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia

Aleksandra

Sevilla Babel — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:43:00 +01:00

Russia, France, 2007
Director: Alexandre Sokurov
Performers: Galina Vishenevskaya, Vasily Shevtsov

Aleksandra is an elderly woman, over 70 years old, who visits her grandson’s home. He is a young officer who lives in a war camp in Chechenya . On her family visit, Aleksandra, very well performed by the soprano Galina Vishenskaya, notices that the furniture has been replaced by war tanks, that the pleasure of the shower is cut by the oversight of those wearing blood-spotted overalls, that people eat less than they consume, and they become exhausted in a profession that leaves them with psychological consequences as an annuity.
In this home sketched by the Russian film maker Alexander Sokurov, there are neither tea nor cookies for the afternoon snack , but young people of barely 20 years who, covered by the desert dust, are waiting for a faceless enemy.

The film that competes these days in the Official Section of European Film Festival in Sevilla, as it did in the Cannes Film Festival, rises over an exquisite staging : it’s interesting how the director uses the elderly woman’s lack of mobility to emphasize the abruptness of the warlike location, or how the photography is designed as yellow and scorching as the dishcloth of the kilometric esplanades wrapping the camp.
In almost an hour and a half of the film, Sokurov slowly creates a state of growing drive in the spectator, which stresses the fact that the war, a practice that should be exceptional as regards mankind relationships, has become a routine. This very well-known Russian film maker, worshipper of “The Mirror” (1974) by Andrei Tarkowsky, creator of half a hundred works among which is the trilogy of the totalitarian personalities: Molokk (1999) about Hitler, Taurus (2001) about Lenin and The Sun (2004) about the Emperor Hiro Hito, seems to have it clear. Whether we like it or not, this thing of cleaning weapons is the daily bread in many villages of the world, and Alexandra ( 2007) follows the position he took over thirty years ago: to denounce it like a film poetry that, pleasant or unpleasant, at least doesn’t leave us indifferent.

Paola García Costas
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia

Anna M.

Sevilla Babel — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 13:50:00 +01:00

France, 2006
Script and direction: Michel Spinosa
Cast: Isabelle Carré, Gilbert Melki, Anne Consigny
Photography: Alain Duplantier
Producer: Patrick Sobelman

PRISON OF LOVE

Who does decide what love is? What separates madness form common sense? Anna M. is in love, brutally in love, destructively in love. Anna M. has the syndrome of Clerambault, what other people call ‘psychosis of the old lady’ or ‘erotic paranoia’, erotomania.
Michel Sponosa tells us in his third film, after his debut Emménemoi (1994) a ‘complicated’ love story, as Spinosa described it in the Panorama Special of the Berlinale ‘07, where the film was also took part. An uncontrolled story of love and passion which a woman lives unavoidably alone, trying by all means to share it with his beloved being, a happily-married doctor who helped her to recover –physically– from a suicide attempt. Anna M. lived, before being what they call erotomanic, a gloom life.

The film was released in France and Belgium in the last spring and it is presented to the Spanish audience in the Official Section of the European Seville Film Festival. In every session, the theatres are full of film lovers who want to quench their thirst of good cinema and want to judge the artistic value of the film. With both photography and music exquisite, Spinosa tries to transport us to the micro-universe of the sweet and reserved Anna M., the isolated and lonely world of the one who restores books in a library and, besides, is erotomanic.

Concha Hierro del Hoyo
Translated by Antonio Martínez Pérez

Gianni Minà or The power of the contrasted journalism

Sevilla Babel — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:47:00 +01:00

This year, the European Seville Film Festival has decided to dedicate one of its tributes to Gianni Minà, showing his six documentaries about Fidel Castro.
Gianni Minà, an Italian journalist, defines himself like a “person fussy for the verità”, so in his job he makes a big effort for contrasting every piece of information, and he even denies data if a mistake is found in them later. This struggle is the reason why this year he is paid tribute.

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.
As he tells, the elaboration of the interview was not conventional at all. After 16 hours with Fidel, Miná discovered that he was not a usual leader, that something in his way of acting was different from the other Heads of State. When asked by the rhetoric used by Fidel in the interview, he assures it was “little, very little”, less than what he has seen in other political leaders. He attributes the European vision of Fidel to a great disinformation and, above all, to the fact that the Old World still sees Fidel Castro like the old Fidel, and is not able to develop with him.
Something that Gianni is really compromised with, besides bringing to Europe a real vision of South America, is the struggle for a democratic and free journalism. That’s why he is part of an organisation of Italian democratic journalists. He, like many Italians, sees worried the few freedom of speech and the using of the media that the government of his country is carrying out.
At present, Gianni is preparing a documentary about the current situation in South America, told by its presidents, of which he says it will be, almost surely, “the last of his great works”.

Sara Domínguez Martín
Translated by Antonio Martínez Pérez

Déjate caer

Sevilla Babel — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:27:00 +01:00

Spain, 2007
Director: Jesús Ponce
Cast: Ivan Massagué, Mercedes Hoyos, Pilar Crespo, Ana Cuesta

This week we could see the release of Déjate caer (Folop down), the third film of Jesús Ponce. Besides being the first person from Seville in the official section of the Festival, the film has been included in the homage to the actors from Andalusia, trying to make visible a new cinematographic wave which is taking place in Andalusia. The tickets were sold out and, between the invited people and the audience, the hall of the theatre Lope de Vega and its blue carpet were more than crowded. Since half an hour before, the actors were arriving and were taken photographs.
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.
The film was shot with few resources. As the director says, it is not more than the story of three boys who “can be found in every capital of the world”. The most pleasant thing is maybe the identification that many members of the audience may feel with the characters. With a comic tone, getting the advantages of the Andalusian dialect and full of common characters who can be found in every street of Seville, the story is, however, bittersweet, almost bitter sometimes, the story of people without a place in the life and have to make an effort to find it.

Sara Domínguez Martín
Translated by Antonio Martínez Pérez

Le Domaine Perdu (The Lost Domain)

Sevilla Babel — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 11:51:00 +01:00

France, Spain, Italy, Romania / 2004
Director and scriptwriter: Raúl Ruiz
Photography: Ion Marionescu
Cast: François Cluzet / Grégoire Colin / Christian Colin / Julie Delarme / Robert Florentin Ilie / Laurence Cordier / Julien Honoré / Marianne Denicourt / Edith Scob

THE TWISTED CINEMA OF RUIZ

Will the lost book ¬—the supposed weaver element of the film— be a member of the audience? I do not know. “The one-eyed cinema”, as the English critics named it thirteen years ago, of this Chilean director (the most known among the unknown ones) runs away of any performance, and never, obviously, straight ahead. Ruiz loves curves, turns and the “other sight”. His cinema is difficult and maybe for that reason is fascinating. It is a challenge for the audience due to the lack of conventions that must mean before beginning to see his films; a 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.
The ambiguity, the dreams, the subconscious, but also the cinematographic meta-speech (meta-language in Becket) are generally the big topics of his wide filmography. Kafka, Stevenson and Borges are some of the sources of Raúl Ruiz. According to D. Font, he is the big “Borgian” film maker and therefore “the big liar”. All this with a baroque rhetoric in a mirrors game in which one does not really know the exact relation between the characters, their condition of alive or dead, their space and their time. A strange nebula for chaotic minds, but with a special and latent order, and Ruiz will probably have a mind like these ones.

Concha Hierro del Hoyo
Translated by: Antonio Martínez Pérez

La Masseria delle Allodole (The Lark Farm)

Sevilla Babel — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:21:00 +01:00

Italy, Bulgaria, Spain, France (2007)
Director: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
Cast: Paz Vega, Ángela Molina, Moritz Bleibtreu

The Lark Farm has opened this year the European Seville Film Festival. This co-production directed by Taviani brothers has among its cast two Spanish actresses: Paz Vega (the main character in the film) and Ángela Molina.
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”.
Both directors assert that, beyond the opinion of the audience, they feel very proud of the film, since the Republic of Armenia has awarded a price for showing the “suffering” of this people.
The film tries to show, in the middle of the cruelty, the ray of hope that there is in people ready to break the rules, in love, in madness, in goodness, and occasionally, in the horrible fear, which makes people make whatever in order to save their lives or the lives of their families, although this means to hurt their own friends. For that reason, the feeling of guilt and remorse are two of the feeling that appear in this story.
A note against the film: the actors overact; sometimes it seems more a theater performance than a film. Especially, the role that plays the wife of the colonel is comical, when it should be dramatic.

Sara Domínguez Martín
Translated by: Antonio Martínez Pérez

Ha-Buah (The Bubble)

Sevilla Babel — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:41:00 +01:00

Israel, 2006

Director: Eytan Fox.

Cast: Ohad Knoller, Yousef Joe Sweid, Daniela Wircer, Alon Friedmann.

Tel Aviv is nowadays a little area unconnected whith the Middle East, a peaceful backwater, a coexistence where it seems everybody can live together: men, women, homosexual and heterosexual people, even Israelis and Palestinian ones... or maybe not completely true.

The film tells the story of three flatmates (a girl and two homosexual boys, but they are not a couple) who are part of a group against the invasion and make coexistence-parties, where only Israeli people go.

As a reflection of the hard reality of Israel, the film, which has not good or bad characters -or at least this is what it tries, because in my opinion there is a little preference for Israelis-, has a lot of daily situations and smiles. It shows us a backward Palestinian area, full of people who carry on with their lives, but where freedom is something unthinkable, and also shows us a freer Jewish area. Borders are torturing areas where pregnant women give birth in the middle of paths.

This film is about the Palestine-Israel conflict, about the confrontation between ones and another, between alive and dead martyrs... but this film is, above all, about love, a pure love between people, beyond their gender, beyod their religion, beyond the place they come from... it is, above all, the union of bodies and lives, only possible without prejudices in the childhood and in the love. But, what happens when those children and in-love people live in a world which does not understand that there are things that do not pay attention to absurd reasons? Can the world finally understand? Can the world understand that a child looks in the eyes to other child and he/she is not able to understand the differences between them?

"The wars are always made against children"... and against people in love. They are the real martyrs in the name of pace.

Sara Domínguez Martín
Translated by: Antonio Martínez Pérez