Almost every screening played to packed houses where press, industry and paying audiences mingled. And it was sweet satisfaction to see director Victor Erice being wildly feted by festival audiences, who gave the Basque master filmmaker the acclaim he was denied at Cannes, where his new film about memory and identity Close Your Eyes inexplicably premiered out of competition. “Cinema has given me and people of my generation, in times of misery and lack of freedom, the ability to become citizens of the world for a few hours,” said Erice at his press conference.

One of San Sebastian’s most attractive features in these post-Covid years has been the intelligent way the festival, which has been directed by José Luis Rebordinas since 2011, has created a ticketing system for press that actually works. Most international press are able to select all their festival tickets in a 36-hour window several days before the event begins, and with five screenings of each film in every section, there is a good chance of switching tickets as the festival shapes up with buzz later in the week. In addition, tickets are automatically loaded onto your press or industry badge, and as long as you have a record of your seat assignment, there is no need for the smart phone scramble at the venue entrance. After the frustrations of systems that create negativity and even anger around festivals before they even start, San Sebastian is a model that should be studied and followed.

Though the main competition (“Official Selection”) was not limited to world premieres and a number of titles were already familiar, the overall selection felt carefully put together, with plenty of discoveries for dedicated journalists and critics. The main jury presided by director Claire Denis chose The Rye Horn (O Corno) as its Golden Shell winner, a beautifully shot if traditional art film by Spanish director Jaione Camborda, it talked about women’s bodies and women’s right to choice in a moving film of great physicality. The San Sebastian-born Camborda is the fourth woman director in a row to win San Sebastian’s best film award, which speaks to the festival’s continuing attention to gender on and off screen. (Previous winners were Laura Mora’s 2022 The Kings of The World, Alina Grigore’s Blue Moon in 2021 and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning in 2020.)

Going home this year without major awards were two other extraordinary films directed by women that should show up at festivals this winter. One of the most popular with critics and audiences was the animated feminist fantasy Sultana’s Dream, directed by Isabel Herguera and inspired by Bengali feminist thinker Rokeya Hossain and her 1905 story about Ladyland, a country run by women. Centered around a modern young woman animator backpacking between Spain and India, it speaks examines the state of fear women are subjected to by men, irrespective of time and place.

Another insightful look at women’s lives was Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the director’s emotionally enveloping impression of growing up female in rural Mississippi. Reaching back over multiple generations, it uses atmosphere rather than conventional narration to show how a woman’s identity is created from many different influences.

The Rye Horn, Sultana’s Dream and All Dirt Roads led a very notable revival of outspoken feminist themes, a trend also visible in some of the best entries in the Horizontes Latinos sidebar. These included Mexican directors like Tatiana Huezo, whose The Echo describes a girl living in a remote village, and Lila Avilés’s intimate, impeccably directed Totem about a seven-year-old girl. The winner of the Horizontes award, The Castle, was another film about independent femmes. It is director Martin Benchimol’s amusing portrait of an Argentine housekeeper who inherits her employer’s mansion in the remote pampa, where she lives with her daughter who is bent on a career as a race car driver.

Another buzzy feminist-area title that will be opening commercially soon is Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, a timely, gripping nerve-jangler about two young Canadian women battling predatory men and toxic masculinity in the Australian outback. Surprisingly, the thriller-like story is firmly grounded in real events, as captured in Pete Gleeson’s harrowing 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie.

The theme of trans children seeking to establish their identity in a uncomprehending world continued this year in films like the fascinating 20,000 Species of Bees, which bowed in Berlin where young star Sofia Otero won the Silver Bear for best leading performance, and the Horizontes title Toll, in which Kauan Alvarenga gave a mature performance as a drag-loving teen who sings in a nightclub, much to his working class mom’s horror. On the other end of the spectrum, two titles in the main competition dealt meaningfully with child abuse. Belgian director Joachim Lafosse’s upper middle class drama A Silence featured Daniel Auteuil as a respected lawyer and a secret consumer of child pornography, enabled by the silence of his wife Emmanuelle Devos.  And Sweden’s Isabella Eklöf’ won the Special Jury Prize for Kalak, an emotionally wrenching drama starring Emil Johnsen as a Danish nurse on the run from his traumatic childhood and  sexually abusive father. Settling in Greenland with his wife and children, he goes into a self-destructive spiral of drug addiction and messy sexual entanglements with Greenlandic women. Nadim Carlsen’s ravishing cinematography also won a Jury Prize in San Sebastian.

A winning trend that one hopes will continue was the appearance of quality adult animation throughout the sections. Apart from the delightfully imaginative Sultana’s Dream (which deserved much more than the Iriza Basque Film Award), the festival opened with The Boy and the Heron from Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. Purported to be the 82-year-old animator’s final film (his last was The Wind Rises in 2013), this gentle picture reprises the themes of mortality and animal/human interchange that have made his work so popular and deep.

They Shot the Piano Player, an animated docu-fiction hybrid from Spanish directing duo Fernando Trueba and Javier Marisca, is a vibrant, kaleidoscopic love letter to a revolutionary period in Brazilian pop music history. But it also pays sombre tribute to Francisco Tenório Júnior, a much-loved jazz and bossa nova pianist who was cruelly abducted and murdered by the Argentinean military dictatorship in 1976, apparently during a random clampdown against bohemian artist-types with potentially dissident opinions.

Although its playful animation sequences are mostly childish reworkings of the popular Fantômette comic books, Red Island directed by Robin Campillo (120 BPM) is a mostly live action adventure that traces the last days of French colonialism on the island of Madagascar, seen through the eyes of a French boy, but in its final scenes through the quite different perceptions of two Malagasy characters. Amusing, ironic and romantic by turn, this politically spot-on tale was an excellent catch for competition, having come out in France in May without any festival support.

It felt somehow fitting that San Sebastian’s closing gala premiere was Dance First by James Marsh, a playfully stylized biopic of the late Irish literary legend Samuel Beckett, starring Gabriel Byrne. As a pioneer of tragicomic absurdist drama, Beckett still exerts a strong gravitational pull on contemporary screenwriters, notably Charlie Kaufman. Indeed, there were echoes of both Beckett and Kaufman across the festival program this year. Swedish director Niklas Larsson’s Mother, Couch! plunged Ewan McGregor, Ellen Burstyn, Taylor Russell and more into an increasingly surreal family crisis, while Christos Nikou’s Fingernails, a charmingly bizarre lo-fi sci-fi rom-com starring Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed, won the independent FIPRESCI prize in San Sebastian.

GOLDEN SHELL for best film
THE RYE HORN (O Corno)
directed by Jaione Camborda
Spain-Portugal-Belgium

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE
KALAK
directed by Isabella Eklof
Sweden-Denmark-Norway-Finland-Greenland-Netherlands

SILVER SHELL for best director
Tzu-hui Peng and Ping-wen Wang
for A JOURNEY IN SPRING (Chun Xing)
Taiwan

SILVER SHELL for best leading performance
Ex aequo to:

• Marcelo Subiotto
  in PUAN
  Argentina
• Tatsuya Fuji
  in GREAT ABSENCE
  Japan

SILVER SHELL for best supporting performance
Hovik Keuchkerian
in UN AMOR
Spain

JURY PRIZE for best screenplay
Maria Alché and Benjamin Naishtat
for PUAN
Argentina

JURY PRIZE for best cinematography
Nadim Carlsen
for KALAK

KUTXABANK – NEW DIRECTORS AWARD
BAHADUR THE BRAVE
directed by Diwa Shah
India

HORIZONTES AWARD
THE CASTLE (El Castillo)
directed by Martin Benchimol
Argentina

ZABALTEGI – TABAKALERA AWARD
THE HUMAN SURGE 3 (El auge del humano 3)
directed by Eduardo Williams
Argentina

SPECIAL MENTION
THE TRIAL (El juicio)
directed by Ulises de la Orden
Argentina

NEST – THE MEDIAPRO NEST AWARD
AMMA KI KATHA
directed by Nehal Vyas
India

SPECIAL MENTION
ENTRE LES AUTRES
directed by Marie Falys
Belgium

CULINARY ZINEMA BEST FILM AWARD
THE POT AU FEU (La passion de Dodin Bouffant)
directed by Tran Anh Hung
Vietnam – France

EUSKO LABEL PRIZE
*           FIRST PRIZE: LATXA
directed by Mikel Urretabzkaia
(Spain)

• SECOND PRIZE: SOROBORDA
  directed by Paolo Tizon
  (Peru – Spain)

IRIZA BASQUE FILM AWARD
SULTANA’S DREAM (El Sueno de la sultana)
directed by Isabel Herguera
(Spain)

CITY OF DONOSTIA/SAN SEBASTIAN AUDIENCE AWARD
SOCIETY OF THE SNOW (La Sociedad de la nieve)
directed by J.A. Bayona
(Spain)
CITY OF DONOSTIA/SAN SEBASTIAN AUDIENCE AWARD
for best European film
IO CAPITANO (I’m Captain)
directed by Matteo Garrone
(Italy)

TCM YOUTH AWARD
THE BLUE STAR (La Estrella azul)
directed by Javier Macipe
(Spain)

In style and theme, Gamma Rays plays like a semi-sequel to Bernadet’s debut feature West of Pluto (2008), a prize-winning docudrama about another gang of adolescents, this time in the director’s native Quebec City. Since then he has made shorts, and episodic series for TV and online broadcast, but he returns to the same teen-centric mosaic formula here using the much larger and more socially mixed canvas of Montreal. Bernadet recruited his young-adult protagonists, all from non-white and immigrant families, via high schools and youth forums in the Saint-Michel and Villeray neighbourhoods, drawing on their own life experiences to create a loose narrative framework.

At its core, Gamma Rays is a triptych of character studies, each a stand-alone plotline but loosely intersecting across the film. Fatima (Chaimaa Zinedine) is a street-wise, hot-tempered beauty from a Moroccan family who works a dead-end job as a supermarket cashier. She previously ran errands for a small-time drug dealer whose clutches she is trying to escape, with only limited success. Meanwhile, shy Abdel (Yassine Jabrane), also from a Morrocan background, becomes steadily more irritated with his boorish cousin Omar (Hani Laroum), who has been imposed on him as house-guest and playmate for the whole summer. Eventually Abdel snaps, leaving Omar alone at a metro station, after which he disappears into the city, triggering an anxious manhunt and angry recriminations at home.

Completing this trio is Toussaint (Chris Kanyembuga), a reserved Afro-Canadian loner with a love of astronomy and fishing. One day, he finds a message in a bottle with a phone number inside, and calls it on impulse. The woman at the other end becomes a kind of confidante and life coach to her new phone friend, slowly coaxing him out of his solitude in a way that appears to be therapeutic for both. This is the most lyrical of the three stories, but also the least convincing, veering into sentimental fairy tale terrain at times. With no friends and no visible family, the supernaturally wise Toussaint feels more like a film-maker’s fantasy than a flesh-and-blood character.

The ending of Gamma Rays feels particulalry Canadian, where any problem can be smoothed over by everyone just being a little bit nicer to each other, possibly while sharing a freshly baked muffin. But despite occasionally glib moments, Bernadet’s big-hearted urban symphony exudes plenty of rough charm and visual poetry. The domestic struggles of Fatima and Abdel have a real-world texture to them, as do the observational scenes featuring teenagers chatting and joking together, seemingly oblivious to the camera. However amateur this cast may be, Zinedine already has professional potential, with the looks and charisma of a movie star.

Visually, the default style of Gamma Rays is hand-held documentary naturalism, but Bernadet counterpoints this raw aesthetic with dreamy cloudscapes, hazy sunsets, artfully composed dissolves between scenes, and even a lightly experimental episode shot using a thermal imaging camera. The director and his team of cinematographers share an especially keen eye for Montreal’s modernist architecture, from familiar icons like the Olympic stadium and Biosphere to striking work-in-progress slabs of concrete brutalism. A heavily deployed score of shimmering, woozy electronica seems designed to reinforce the film’s underlying message that life-affirming beauty can be found even in the city’s most neglected neighbourhoods.

Director: Henry Bernadet
Screenwriters: Henry Bernadet, Nicolas Krief, Isabelle Brouillette
Cast: Chaimaa Zinedine, Chris Kanyembuga, Yassine Jabrane, Hani Laroum, Océane Garçon-Gravel
Producer: Vuk Stojanovic
Cinematography: Philémon Crête, Nathan B Foisy, Philippe St-Gelais
Editing: Jules Saulnier
Music: Maxime Veilleux, Mathieu Charbonneau, Simon Trotier
Production company: Coop Video de Montreal (Canada)
World sales: H264 (Canada)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (New Directors)
In French
99 minutes

Once again featuring sure-footed Brazilian art house actress Maeve Jinkings as the single mother Suellen who can’t bring herself to accept her son Tiquinho’s desire for men, Toll is almost a companion piece to Charcoal, which won prizes at festivals from Rio de Janeiro to Transilvania (Markowicz was also voted best first-time director at the Cinema Brazil awards.) Here, however, the farcical humor is mostly restricted to Suellen’s crazy scheme to convert Tiquinho into a heterosexual family man, while the rest of the film drags its heels describing her tiresome job as a toll booth attendant on a mountain highway. After bowing in Toronto, it closes San Sebastian’s Horizontes Latinos on a rather dour note, while rightly underlining the section’s focus on social themes and new women directors.

Suellen and Tiquinho – who are genuinely close, despite their differing ideas about homosexuality – share a cramped apartment with the laid-back Arauto (Thomás Aquino), a petty thief who more or less lives at Suellen’s expense. When she discovers his stash of stolen watches and jewelry, she’s upset enough to throw him out, but later the situation changes and they go into business together with a Bonnie and Clyde exuberance that puts the zing back in their sex life.

Meanwhile, the 17-year-old Tiquinho, played with melancholy flair tinged with touching seriousness by an excellent Kauan Alvarenga, goes to high school, suffers an unreturned crush on a boy his age, and much to his mom’s shame, posts videos of himself dressed up and crooning old-fashioned songs. Suellen’s great anti-gay obsession leads her to light “virility” candles in a mountain sanctuary at 5:30 in the morning before going to work, but her eccentric friend and co-worker Telma (the always amusing Aline Marta Maia) urges her to get “scientific” and enroll him in a pricey sexual re-education course run by a fishy foreign pastor (Isac Graca, looking like a grave Jesus Christ while saying the most outrageous things). Lines like “Satan lives in a boy’s body until he’s 17, then it’s squatters’ rights” get a laugh. But the screenplay often gets bogged down in Suellen’s misguided attempts to redirect her son’s life, like getting him a job as a forklift operator when he so obviously is drawn to performing.

Editors Ricardo Saraiva and Lautaro Colace keep the balls rolling gracefully, and we first see Tiquinho sitting at the well-attended course before we find out how Suellen has managed to finance this folly. Suffice it to say that armed robbery triggered by phone calls from the toll booth are involved. What is more surprising is how many attendees Pastor Isac has signed up, both men and women. In one absurd therapy session, they are made to remodel clay phalluses into the shape of vaginas (for the men) and vice versa for the women. But there is a silver lining for Tiquinho, who has a chance to meet other gay men and move on from his crush, opening the door to a satisfying resolution that sidesteps some threatened melodrama.

Noteworthy here in establishing atmosphere and contrast are D.P. Luis Armando Arteaga’s impressions of the remote landscape of virgin forests defaced by smoking industrial chimneys and metal trellises reaching into the sky. On the other end of the spectrum are the labyrinthine hovels where the characters do their best to live, shot like animal warrens of unfinished concrete.

Director, screenplay: Carolina Markowicz
Cast: Maeve Jinkings, Kauan Alvarenga, Thomás Aquino, Aline Marta Maia, Caio Acedo, Isac Graça, Erom Cordeira
Producers: Karen Castanho, Bianca Villar, Fernando Fraiha, Luis Urbano
Cinematography: Luis Armando Arteaga
Editing: Ricardo Saraiva, Lautaro Colace
Music: Filipe Derado
Sound: André Bellentani
Production companies: Bionica Filmes (Brazil), O Som e a Furia (Portugal)
World Sales: Luxbox (France)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Horizontes Latinos)
In Portuguese
101 minutes

En España 1973 se estaba experimentando una lenta apertura cultural, con Franco muy enfermo y las fuerzas armadas más preocupadas por el grupo separatista vasco ETA –ese año asesinó al almirante Carrero Blanco– que por películas levantiscas. No se podía discutir la guerra civil y sus efectos, pero se podían sugerir cosas. Y Víctor Erice es un maestro en hacer sutiles, poéticas y efectivas alusiones.

Ese año su primera película El Espíritu de la colmena ganó la Concha de oro, premio a la mejor película en el Festival de San Sebastián. Cincuenta años después, con tres películas más y 83 años de edad Erice regresa al festival hoy, como un maestro del cine español al que le será entregado el Premio Donostia por su contribución al arte cinematográfico; premio que se agregará a otros muchos ganados por cada película.

El espíritu de la colmena se desarrolla en un caserío en Castilla, en 1940, año del nacimiento de Erice y un año después de que Franco subió al poder. Es la historia de una familia que hace esfuerzos por vivir como si nada hubiera pasado; el padre escribe textos metafísicos sobre sus abejas; la madre escribe cartas que son poco más que botellas arrojadas al mar. Las dos hijas Isabel y Ana, de 8 y 6 años aprenden aritmética en rimas mezcladas con oraciones a las ánimas del purgatorio. El cine se convierte aquí en el elemento disruptivo y será una constante en el cine de Erice. Frankenstein, y un prófugo republicano, se mezclan en la fértil imaginación de Ana que quiere contactar a un espíritu mientras trata de entender la magia del cine. La fotografía luminosa y añorante que recuerda a los pintores españoles clásicos, del magnífico Luis Cuadrado, inspiró a generaciones de cinefotógrafos.

El espíritu de la colmena fue recibido con entusiasmo y premios en festivales. Después siguió la espera por la siguiente película del director, que tardó 10 años en llegar: El Sur. Es otra historia de la postguerra en la que Estrella, que pasa de los 11 a los 16 años en la película, descubre –otra vez con la ayuda del cine– la carga de los recuerdos y el pasado.

Ni en El espíritu de la colmena ni en El sur, se discute religión, ni política, ni de dinero, en realidad se habla muy poco. Se escribe algo más, se escucha y se imagina mucho. En especial por las niñas protagonistas en ambas cintas. En El sur se puede mostrar –había muerto Franco– la negativa del padre por asistir a la iglesia, se dice que la madre es una “maestra represaliada” y Estrella sueña con un mítico Sur dónde hace calor, hay palmeras y todos están alegres. El sur fue planeada como una película en dos partes, de la que solo se pudo filmar la primera, irónicamente, la que ocurre en el norte.

Nueve años después de EL Sur, se estrenó El sol del membrillo; un cuasi documental –no ofendería al cineasta llamándole “falso”– en el que el pintor español Antonio López trata de retratar la esencia del sol y la presencia de un membrillero.  

El sol del membrillo, estrenada en 1992, es la vida cotidiana en el estudio de Antonio López, mientras él trata de pintar un membrillero.  El artista es acompañado, cuidado e interrumpido por trabajadores migrantes, su familia, y otros personajes.  López, un hombre generoso y afable habla de arte mientras describe el árbol, las frutas y el sol sobre ellas. La mirada de Erice sigue al sol y a los habitantes de la casa, solo se aleja en una toma abierta ante un grupo vestido con elegancia, marchantes de arte probablemente. Al final es el cine el que puede dar el epílogo de las pinturas sin terminar, con una cámara en escena y luces que dan al membrillo lo que el sol no pudo.

Los siguientes 30 años Erice se “entretuvo” con cortos y fragmentos de películas en conjunto. Cuando la esperanza de otra película estaba casi perdida para sus admiradores, Erice dirigió Cerrar los ojos, que se estrenó en el Festival de Cannes este año. En ella un director español busca a un actor, que desapareció 30 años atrás pero nunca se encontró su cuerpo.

Víctor Erice tiene la habilidad de hacer películas engañosamente simples, con varios contextos, imágenes y sonidos que van metiéndose en las circunvoluciones cerebrales del espectador, a veces jugando, unas esquivas y otras se quedan a vivir allí.  La luz dorada, los personajes que se sienten cercanos, planos abiertos barridos por el viento, los ojos de Ana Torrent –una niña en El espíritu de la colmena, una mujer adulta en Cerrar los ojos– se quedan en la memoria. Según el espectador pueden ser más pasajeras las imágenes de casas que parecen abandonadas, calzadas de cipreses, los cadáveres, la música melancólica, el sentimiento de tristeza al terminar la película seguido por la alegría de haber podido verla. En el centro de cada película, rodeada de una gran belleza formal hay un búsqueda por la identidad, tanto individual como colectiva. Después una reflexión sobre los recuerdos, su peso y su importancia en la sobrevivencia. Temas con lo que todos los espectadores se relacionan.

La crítica Deborah Young dijo sobre Cerrar los ojos “es una apasionada y atractiva reflexión sobre el arte, la memoria, la identidad”. Víctor Erice cerró el círculo, porque –a pesar de los 50 años transcurridos- esto no parece muy distante del final de El espíritu de la colmena en la que, para atraer a un espíritu, la niña repite “soy Ana, soy Ana, soy Ana”.

A film dripping with the kind of irony and atmosphere that Marguerite Duras could appreciate, only much more playful, Red Island (L’Île rouge) marks writer and director Robin Campillo’s first return to directing after his 2017 documentary on AIDS activists, 120 BPM, won the Cannes Grand Prix. Perhaps what the two films have in common is their political POV on a critical moment in time that turned out to be a turning point: in the documentary, for the gay community who took a hands-on approach to AIDS treatment; in the new film, for the French nation, who had to let go of their hold on a foreign country.

Madagascar, as the film explains, gained its independence in 1960 but the French army still hung around until the early 1970s, when the Malagasy Republic severed all ties. Describing the French attitude toward the native population in a variety of ways, Red Island is admirably not a one-note blame game, but shows the true camaraderie, friendship and even romance that occasionally sweetened one-on-one French-Malagasy relationships. But the overwhelming sentiment of the occupying expatriates is a paternalistic colonialism that deliberately demeaned locals, forcing them to learn French in school but at the same time keeping them in servile positions as a work force.

It’s a typical day of relaxation on the beach for air force engineer Robert Lopez, his wife Colette and their three sons when a formation of French planes appear in the sky, releasing a charming sequence of parachutes behind them. Later we learn these are not gifts for the populace but combat soldiers from the Madagascar army, working in tandem with the French to quell an uprising of local farmers.

Campillo uses quite a free hand in constantly shifting the viewpoint from the young son Thomas Lopez (played with deep originality by Charlie Vauselle), who adores his mother and roams the military base freely on his bike with the girl who sits next to him at school, to the self-conscious adults who know the end of the idyll is fast approaching. Their wine-soaked parties and coyly sexy dancing beautifully evoke the nerdy, insular spirit of military families. The well-cast Robert (Quim Gutiérrez) and Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) have a hint of non-Frenchness about them that keeps them from being as grotesque as their friends and worth caring about, even as Colette strives for more autonomy in a stifling marriage that seems like it may be on the rocks.

Opening the film (and recurring several times) is an amusing faux-animation sequence that features the youthful superheroine Fantômette, a caped crusader who dons a black mask to battle criminals in her spare time. Thomas and his friend are totally hooked on the comic book series, to the point that his mother sews him a Fantômette costume. He will secretly don it on the family’s last night on the island before they return to France.

This is also the fateful night when the much-frowned-upon romance between handsome young soldier Bernard (Hugues Delamarlière) and his local girlfriend Minagaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala) explodes in one of the hottest dance scenes in recent memory. Interestingly, the couple is observed both by Thomas, who gets an eyeful from a window, and a local soldier who works with Bernard in the officers’ mess. He and Minagaly break the spell by talking politics when Bernard falls asleep, paving the way for a surprise final scene that takes the story out of the narrative mode altogether, into an unexpectedly realistic space of political prisoners returning from confinement. Though the film’s tonal eclecticism may be disturbing to some, Campillo is certainly bold in leaping registers like this.

Cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie does an excellent job recreating the retro feeling of a faded postcard from the tropics, along with the rather eerie Fantômette sequences. And naturally music plays a big part in bringing home a time out of time, where the songs have nothing to do with the island and merely serve as reminders of a big outside world.

Director, screenplay: Robin Campillo
Cast: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutiérrez, Charlie Vauselle, Amely Rakotoarimalala, Hugues Delamarlière, Sophie Guillemin, David Serero, Luna Carpiaux, Mitia Ralaivita
Producer: Marie-Ange Luciani
Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie
Editing: Robin Campillo, Anita Roth, Stéphanie Léger
Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay
Costume design: Isabelle Pannetier
Music: Arnaud Rebotini
Sound:  Julien Tan-Ham Sicart, Valérie De Loof, Thomas Gauder
Production companies: Les Films de Pierre in association with Scope Pictures (Belgium), France 3 Cinéma (France) DDC (Madagascar), Memento Films Production (France), Playtime (France)
World Sales: Playtime (France)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Official Selection)
In French
116 minutes

The original poem concerns the existence of the emotionally lifeless, here represented by a prodigal son (Kakha Kintsurashvili) and his bitter, aged father (Murman Jinoria). The son has recently returned to their rural home in Georgia after years in the United States after his mother passed away. No longer bound together by the woman who clearly maintained any semblance of familial bond between them, the film is a study of a strained relationship captured in chilly hues and hung in an atmosphere of quiet tragedy.

The son’s arrival back in Georgia is not a triumphant one. He feels as though he is there through a sense of duty and, perhaps, the failure of his own particular American dream. He is distant from his father, mournful to the extent of detachment, and somewhat adrift in a home he no longer seems comfortable and familiar in. He takes his father’s jabs – from verbal barbs about abandonment to one fierce physical slap on the face – largely without retort, but their mutual iciness is reproach enough. He may tend to his father’s frailties, silently cleaning up his sick in the night, but these actions feel perfunctory and never verge upon the warmth of filial affection.

Cinematographer Evgeny Rodin frames the slowly unfolding drama in withdrawn medium or long shots, often only containing one of the men at a time – or separating them with reflections or camera movements. When they are placed together, it is usually to witness the latest sour exchange. When not rattling around the dimly lit house, the son tries to re-learn to ride a horse, attempting awkwardly to reconnect with the life he left behind.

The end credits are accompanied by a performance of ‘Hey, ho, the wind and the rain’ from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which suggests harshness in life is commonplace. This might imply that things carry on regardless, but We Are the Hollow Men is so deeply saturated by such an affecting sadness, defined by the spiritual emptiness of its leading men, that it is difficult to see far beyond it.

Director, producer: Rati Oneli
Cast: Kakha Kintsurashvili, Murman Jinoria        
Screenplay: Evgeniia Marchenko, Rati Oneli
Cinematography: Evgeny Rodin
Editing: Rati Oneli, Evegeniia Marchenko
Sound: Beso Kacharava
Distribution: Office of Film Architecture (Georgia)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Zabaltegi – Tabakalera)
In Azerbaijani, Georgian
16 minutes

A rueful meditation on mid-life melancholy, marital failure, family tensions and looming mortality, Ex-Husbands is a kind of anti-rom-com. Indeed, it could have been called No Weddings and One Funeral. But Pritzker and his team still maintain a genial, broadly cheerful tone despite these darker background currents. The result is a modestly scaled film of understated charm and mirthful moments, a little flat and creaky in places, but hard to dislike.

Ex-Husbands world premieres in competition in San Sebastian this week, the film-makers in attendance after receiving special dispensation from the striking SAG-AFTRA union to promote their low-key indie project. A US debut follows next week at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Dunne’s track record and Norton’s growing international profile should help generate sales interest, with older audiences an obvious target market.

Pritzker’s sardonic, talk-heavy screenplay feels like a knowingly nostalgic homage to American indie cinema’s wry ensemble comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly that lost New York milieu mapped out by vintage Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Mike Nichols and Philip Roth. The casting of 85-year-old actor-director Richard Benjamin certainly feels like a winking homage to this fruitful screen era, while the pairing of Dunne and Arquette as divorcees is clearly a playfully meta reference to their youthful romantic chemistry in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985). Still a dapper charmer  in his late sixties, Dunne now radiates a kind of rumpled, soulful grace reminiscent of Alan Alda or Jack Lemmon. The setting may be contemporary, but the mood music here in unashamedly analogue.

Ex-Husbands opens with a deft piece of dramatic symmetry, the first flicker of a budding romance mirrored by the dying embers of a long-term love. Just as hunky but mentally fragile restaurant worker Nick (James Norton) tentatively flirts with future wife Thea (Rachel Zeiger-Haag) for the first time, his sixty-something dentist dad Peter (Dunne) reels from the news that his own elderly father Simon (Benjamin, still a lively screen presence) is divorcing his wife after 65 years together. Pritzker then jumps forwards six years to find Nick preparing for his upcoming wedding, while Simon is now in a nursing home suffering from dementia, and Peter himself is on the brink of divorce from wife Maria (Arquette).

By groaningly contrived coincidence, newly single Peter has booked himself a holiday on the very same weekend, and at the very same Mexican resort location, as Nick’s bachelor party. When postponing his trip proves too expensive, Peter reassures Nick and his younger brother Mickey (Miles Heizer, likeable but colourless) that he will make sure to stay away from their private festivities. Of course, this promise proves impossible. Father and sons inevitably cross paths, when minor friction between them come to the surface in a series of wry, rambling conversational scenes.

The comedic register here is low-voltage farce, with no shock twists or serious conflicts to darken the picture. While Mickey has recently come out as gay, his lusty holiday fling with allegedly straight party guest Arroyo (Pedro Fontaine) is presented as harmless fun, and warmly welcomed by his liberal father. Nick’s struggles with depression and doubts over his impending wedding strike the only glum note here, but they feel somewhat frictionless in such a sunny comic setting, especially coming from somebody with Norton’s pin-up looks and natural surface confidence. Although the Mexico trip ends on a messy, downbeat anticlimax, it ultimately pulls the family closer together.

As the title suggests, Ex-Husbands is inevitably focussed on male anxiety, specifically a rarefied strain of white, heterosexual, middle-class New Yorker angst. Women cast members, especially Arquette, are under-used. That said, the world Pritzker’s film inhabits never feels too socially narrow or self-absorbed, while the background chorus of secondary female, gay and non-white characters are more than just incidental furniture.

Visually, Pritzker and cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo mostly favour a muted, deadpan, indie-movie look. A soundtrack peppered with vintage jazz and folk-rock Americana is another clear nod to older vinyl-era viewers, and generally easy on the ears, although Robin Coudert’s guitar-picking score becomes intrusively sentimental during the heart-tugging finale, a rare heavy-handed mis-step in an otherwise light-touch movie.

Director, screenwriter: Noah Pritzker
Cast: Griffin Dunne, James Norton, Miles Heizer, Rosanna Arquette, Eisa Davis, Richard Benjamin, Pedro Fontaine, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Zora Casebere, John Ventimiglia, Lou Taylor Pucci, Echo Kellum
Producers: Bruce Cohen, Alexandra Byer, Nicholas Célis
Cinematography: Alfonso Herrera Salcedo
Editing: Michael Taylor
Music: Robin Coudert
Production companies: Bold Choices Productions (US), Rathaus Films (US), Pimienta Films (Mexico)
World sales: United Talent Agency (UTA)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (official selection)
In English
99 minutes

That year, his first film The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena) won the best film award, the Golden Shell, at the San Sebastián Festival. Now, fifty years later, at the age of 83 and with just three more films under his belt, Erice returns to the festival as an acclaimed master of Spanish cinema. He will receive the Donostia Prize for his contribution to cinematographic art, an award that will be added to many others he has won for each of his films.

The Spirit of the Beehive takes place in a small town in Castille in 1940, the year of Erice’s birth and a year after Franco had come to power in Spain. It is the story of a family that goes to extraordinary lengths to live as if nothing has happened: the father writes metaphysical texts about his bees, the mother writes letters that are little more than bottles cast into the ocean. The two daughters Isabel and Ana, ages 8 and 6, learn arithmetic in rhymes mixed with prayers offered to the souls in Purgatory.

Cinema becomes the disruptive element here and will be a constant in Erice’s work. In Ana’s fertile imagination, Frankenstein and a Republican fugitive mix. and she tries to contact a spirit to understand the magic of cinema. The luminous, yearning photography, so reminiscent of classical Spanish painters, is by the magnificent DP Luis Cuadrado, who has inspired generations of cinematographers. The Spirit of the Beehive was met with enthusiastic acclaim and received several awards at film festivals.

While audiences waited impatiently, the director’s next film took ten years to arrive. The South (El Sur) is another post-war story in which a girl, Estrella, who ages from 11 to 16 years old in the film, discovers – again with the help of cinema – the burden of memories and the past.

In The Spirit of the Beehive as well as in The South, religion, politics, and money are not discussed; in fact, very little is discussed. The characters write a little, and listen and imagine a lot. Especially the girls, who are the protagonists of both films. By the time The South came out in 1983, Franco was dead and more things could be shown: the father refuses to attend church, the mother is referred to as a “rebuked teacher,” and Estrella dreams of a mythical South where it is warm, there are palm trees and everyone is happy. The South was planned as a two-part film, of which only the first part could be made. Ironically, it’s the part that takes place in the north.

Nine years after The South, Dream of Light (El sol del membrillo, sometimes called The Pear Tree Sun) was released in 1992. It could be called a quasi-documentary – I would not offend the filmmaker by calling it “false” – in which Spanish painter Antonio López works in his studio trying to portray the essence of the sun and to paint a quince tree. The artist is accompanied, cared for, and interrupted by migrant workers, his family, and other characters. López, a generous and affable man, talks about art while describing the tree, its fruits and the effect of the sun on them. Erice’s gaze follows the sun and the inhabitants of the house, widening the perspective only with a group of elegantly dressed people, probably art dealers. In the end, it is cinema that can give an epilogue to unfinished paintings, with a camera on stage and lights that give the quince tree what the sun could not.

During the next 30 years, Erice “entertained” himself with short films and fragments of ensemble films. Just when his fans had lost hope for another full-length feature, he directed Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos), which premiered at Cannes this year. In it, a Spanish director searches for an actor, who vanished 30 years ago but whose body was never found.

Víctor Erice has the ability to make deceptively simple films, with various contexts, images and sounds that get into the spectator’s brain, sometimes to play there, sometimes elusive, and at other times remaining there to live. The golden light, the characters who feel so close, open shots of plains swept by the wind, the eyes of Ana Torrent (a young girl in The Spirit of the Beehive, an adult woman in Close Your Eyes) all remain in the memory. Depending on the viewer, these may include the images of houses that seem abandoned, cypress roads, corpses, melancholic music, the whistle of a train, the feeling of sadness at the end of the film — followed by the joy of having been able to see it, albeit fleetingly. At the center of each of Erice’s films, surrounded by great formal beauty, there is a search for identity, both individual and collective, and a reflection on memories, their weight and their importance to survival. Topics that all audiences relate to.

Critic Deborah Young called Close Your Eyes “a passionate and attractive reflection on art, memory, identity.” Víctor Erice closed the circle, because – despite the 50 years that have passed – this does not seem very distant from the end of The Spirit of the Beehive in which, to attract a spirit, the girl repeats, “I am Ana, I am Ana, I am Ana”.

More about Victor Erice

Close Your Eyes

San Sebastian 2023: The Verdict

Cannes 2023: The Verdict

Launched in Telluride and Toronto to general acclaim, The Royal Hotel screens in competition in San Sebastian this week. Though it wavers uneasily between subtle art-house observations and crowd-pleasing thriller tropes at times, Green’s second dramatic feature is mostly compelling and engaging. A strong cast, timely themes, stunning landscapes and fan-friendly genre elements could translate into healthy box office numbers when it opens next month.

Launching her career with acclaimed documentaries like Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2013) and Casting JonBenet (2017), Green then moved into fictional drama with The Assistant (2019), a scathing depiction of film-industry misogyny released just as the #MeToo movement erupted. On some level, The Royal Hotel is a spiritual sequel to The Assistant, reuniting Green with star Julia Garner for another forensic critique of the male gaze and patriarchal power abuse.

Both films also draw heavily on real people and real events. Indeed, The Royal Hotel is actually a fictionalised remake of director Pete Gleeson’s observational documentary Hotel Coolgardie (2016), which charted the bruising expeirneces of two young Finnish women working in a small-town bar in Western Australia. The names and nationalities have been changed here, and the underlying mood of creeping dread amplified, but only slightly.

Green sets up The Royal Hotel with impressively brisk, agile strokes. In the middle of a superbly filmed floating techno party on a cruise boat in Sydney harbour, Canadian twentysomething backpackers Hanna (Garner) and Liv (British Games of Thrones and Iron Fist co-star Jessica Henwick) suddenly discover they are broke. Faced with either cutting short their Australian vacation or working for a few weeks, they agree to take temporary bartender jobs at a rowdy pub in a remote Outback mining town. With ominous understatement, the employment agent in Sydney warns them they will need to be “comfortable with a little male attention.”

Bearing the ironically grandiose title The Royal Hotel, this far-flung oasis turns out to be a ramshackle saloon run by boorish alcoholic Billy (a muscular, committed turn from Aussie screen icon Hugo Weaving) and his long-suffering partner Carol (Ursula Yovich). The arrival of two pretty young women in an ultra-macho backwater instantly causes ripples of sexual tension among the bar’s heavily male clientele, who bombard the “fresh meat” with suggestive jokes, indecent proposals and persistently creepy attention. When they protest, Hanna and Liv are derided as uptight outsiders who fail to appreciate harmless Aussie locker-room humour. The Donald Trump defence, in other words.

Hanna and Liv slowly learn to navigate this oppressive social terrain, forming an uneasy bond with handsome bad boy Matty (Toby Wallace) and dim but well-meaning Teeth (James Frecheville). But some of the bar’s other regulars, notably brooding Dolly (Daniel Henshall), cross the line into menacing, abusive behaviour. Green smartly deconstructs the prickly power balance here between predatory men and female prey, the steady micro-aggressions and veiled threats that lie behind so much routine male entitlement. In an extra turn of the screw, a rift opens up late in the film between Hanna and Liv that puts both of them at greater risk.

Throughout The Royal Hotel, Green toys with Outback Horror tropes, hinting at sexualised violence and other monstrous misdeeds to come, only to smartly unpack these cliches by focussing more on the everyday horrors of misogyny, compounded by a nihilistic culture of chronic alcoholism. After sustaining this commendable tonal control for over an hour, the film’s final descent into apocalyptic chaos feels like a cop-out, pandering to genre conventions rather than subverting them.

Characters who were once plausibly cautious suddenly become illogically reckless, ambiguous allies become bestial gargoyles, and a story that began with nuanced social critique ends with broad sledgehammer strokes. While there is a certain pleasing catharsis in seeing Liz and Hanna slay the patriarchal dragon, it feels like a conveniently neat closure is being imposed on a writhing snakepit unresolved issues. Sure, you can check out of Hotel Toxic Masculinity any time you like, but you can never really leave.

Whatever its arguable shortcomings in narrative logic, The Royal Hotel is a high-calibre package overall, and Green clearly a skilled film-maker. Garner fills her scenes with riveting low-voltage tension, Henwick radiates a dangerously innocent charm, and the male support cast all do fine work with mostly mono-dimensional roles. Michael Latham’s cinematography drinks in the full sun-bronzed alien majesty of the ruggedly beautiful South Australian locations while the witty soundtrack has fun with some veteran Aussie music icons, from the sly techno remix of Men at Work’s 1981 hit “Land Down Under” that opens the film to the recurring use of pop diva Kylie Minogue as a semi-ironic motif.

Director: Kitty Green
Screenwriters: Kitty Green, Oscar Redding
Cast: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Hugo Weaving, Ursula Yovich, Bree Bain, Toby Wallace, Daniel Henshall, James Frecheville, Herbert Nordrum
Producers: Iain Canning, Kath Shelper, Emile Sherman, Liz Watts
Cinematography: Michael Latham
Editing: Kasra Rassoulzadegan
Music: Jed Palmer
Production companies: See-Saw Films (UK), Scarlett Pictures (Australia)
World sales: HanWay Films (UK)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (official selection)
In English
90 minutes

In her second feature after Arima (2020), San Sebastian-born director Jaione Camborda displays her talent directing a cast of non-pro actors in scenes that can be harsh and visceral, but also seeringly honest, as they deal directly with women’s bodies.

Anyone looking for edgy material, humor, irony or genre-mashing should apply elsewhere. We are in classic art film territory here, where dialogue is reduced to the essential among characters who are simple folks tied to their homes and families. Bowing in Toronto’s Platform followed by San Sebastian’s Official Selection, the film can count on the support of female viewers in particular, and perhaps on the topicality of legal changes to long-standing abortion laws that endanger women’s lives while making it increasingly difficult for them to control reproduction on their own. Although this is not a preachy film with a message, it clearly champions individual choice and women’s rights over their own bodies.

Audiences will be tested in their commitment in the extended first scene, in which an island woman goes through a very difficult labor giving birth to her fourth child. Filmed in unflinching close-up on the face of the tortured, screaming mother Carmen, the whole thing is so painful and harrowing that the stunned family slinks out of the room. There is no doctor present, only Maria (Janet Novas), who helps local women deliver their babies and whose calm voice and encouraging words are a godsend.

One of the watchers that day is Carmen’s daughter Luisa (Carla Rodriguez Rivas), a fleet-footed high schooler who aspires to compete nationally in running competitions. The time is 1971 and the island still feels very remote from mainland Spain. Camborda uses a minimum of shots and dialogue to show that Luisa has a boyfriend, but she still wants to leave the island if she’s chosen for the team. He leaves a love-bite on her neck; later, she finds out she’s pregnant.

Wide-eyed but not so innocent about what’s happening to her, she implores Maria to help her get rid of the baby. Spain is still under the control of Franco and the Roman Catholic Church, and the law severely punishes anyone who procures or performs an abortion. Maria is reluctant, even though her method is a natural remedy, a potent herbal tea made from a horn-like growth on certain rye stalks. She harvests it for Luisa.

In the second half of the film the story enters a dramatic new phase, in which Maria is forced to flee from the island and disappear into neighboring Portugal. Novas, a dancer and choreographer making her acting debut here, brings raw realism to Maria’s narrow escape by night, stumbling through woods and hitching rides with sheep farmers. At first she is frighteningly on her own, until she finds comfort and kindness from various women she meets on her way – a tavern owner and her brave daughter, and later an African prostitute (a somber Siobhan Fernandes) who offers her shelter. Again Camborda’s screenplay sidesteps a heavy message about female solidarity to concentrate on how the poor help the poor, especially against their universal oppressors: the police and border guards.

Impressively lensed by veteran Portuguese D.P. Rui Poças (Alma Viva) , this is one film in which the lush, tactile photography is not a decorative distraction but actually drives the narrative forward. The unforgiving close shots of women cleaning shellfish or working the fields with their bare hands, having babies and making love in the forest dirt, give the story a very special sort of three-dimensionality and believability. Also notable is Camilo Sanabria’s music; its initially gentle and soothing score enters a pulsating new register as it follows Maria as a fugitive on the run.

Director, screenplay: Jaione Camborda
Cast: Janet Novas, Siobhan Fernandes, Carla Rodriguez Rivas, Daniela Hernan Marchan, Mario Lado, Julia Gomez, Nuria Lestegas, Diego Anido
Producers: Jaione Camborda, Andrea Vazquez, Maria Zamora, Rodrigo Areias, Katleen Goossens
Cinematography: Rui Pocas
Editing: Christopher Fernandez
Production design: Melania Freire
Costume design: Uxia P. Vaello
Music: Camilo Sanabria
Sound: Sergio Silva
Production companies: Esnatu Zinema (Spain), Miramemira (Spain), Elastica Films (Spain), Side Aside (Portugal), Bulletproof Cupid (Belgium)
World Sales: Films Boutique (France)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Galician, Portuguese
103 minutes

Amongst their number was the 12-year-old Junior, whose death left behind his parents and a younger sister; a family rent apart by their pain. 16 years later, Angelica Maria Torres Tamayao’s film charts her decision to undertake the very same hike that her brother was never able to complete, to Cerro Guali on the slopes of Nevado del Ruiz. Accompanied by her mother, the walk is an act of pilgrimage and reclamation, and Tamayo’s film weaves together footage of this with an epistolary examination of long-fingered damage caused by overwhelming grief.

The film opens with a reflection on the filmmaker’s first encounters with death – in the form of Junior’s various hamsters which were quickly and quietly replaced by their father. To that child, death was something easily repairable and so she struggled to even comprehend the horror that befell the family when they lost their firstborn son. Tamayo’s mother, Alma, could not stay and her father found it impossible to process his sorrow.

That barrier still exists; despite being asked to undertake the walk with her, he declined. Instead, mother and daughter travel together, discussing the lasting impact that the loss has had on them as individuals and their relationship. The hike is captured in fairly unobtrusive verité fashion, with cinematographer Sebastian Contreras following the pair on the journey and observing moments of intimate kinship and private reflection.

In amongst this footage, Tamayo presents various archival materials – some home movie footage, and photographs of her and Juniors as kids – along with a narration directed at her brother. Through this, she manages to make a film that is deeply specific to the heartrending nature of her loss, as a child left to find their own way through grief to understanding. However, Pirsas is also a profoundly empathetic work that wrestles with a universal element of the human condition – what it means to be one of those left behind, and how important it is to find personal and collective solace.

Director, screenplay: Angelica Maria Torres Tamayo
Producers: Angelica Maria Torres Tamayo, Jaime E. Manrique
Cinematography: Sebastian Contreras
Editing: Valeria Gonzalez Paternina, Angelica Maria Torres Tamayo
Sound: Jaime E. Manrique
Distribution: Bogoshorts Film Agency (Colombia)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Nest)
In Spanish
20 minutes

The film takes as its structure the fables told by grandmothers such as a creation story in which India is held aloft upon the backs of four giant elephants. Through this form, Vyas creates four chapters in which each of the elephants encounters the next progression in the ongoing saga of the country – from its birth to its current political landscape via the legends that inform some of the populace’s sense of national identity.

The film uses a variety of techniques to examine the different facets of its discourse, from non-fiction montage to stop-motion animation, theatrical performance, and song. Each of the chapters has a slightly different aesthetic flavour that perhaps intimate, in some sense, the different ways in which these chronicles are being presented and portrayed to different ends. After a prologue combining live action and animation, the first chapter presents the viewer with an impressionistic documentary portrait of India accompanied by audio from a radio recitation of the constitution. The inherent hope of that opening, however, is undermined across the remaining three chapters.

A miniature play set against a glittering homemade backdrop recounts – in a childlike, idealistic fashion – part of the Ramayana which builds to the abduction of Sita. Next, a song is sung that suggests a growing bitterness that is being spread in the name of God, before a final sequence watches boats crossing a lake while a dreamlike story is told of India being caught on a boat drifting between the desires of its people and the will of those who deem them unacceptable, never able to disembark.

For Vyas, the folklore passed down to her by her grandmother is being twisted, through various reincarnations and reinterpretations to support the will of the Hindutva state that currently controls India and has been in power since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014. Here. She presents all four of her different interpretations of a shifting national myth in luminescent imagery and hypnotic audio, making all the more striking how easy it is for agendas to be slipped unnoticed into familiar fables and our heroes to be co-opted by those in power.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Nehal Vyas
Music: Aahvaan Project
Sound: Aidan Reynolds
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Nest)
In Hindi, Urdu
21 minutes

Filmed in North Carolina but set in a more universal, purposely vague North American locale, Mother, Couch! has a knowingly grungy, downbeat, indie-movie look. World premiered in Toronto, it screens in the New Directors strand in San Sebastian this week. Early reviews have already drawn parallels with Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), another family crisis story disguised as a reality-bending comedy adventure. Echoes of Darren Aronofsky and Charlie Kaufman are also discernible here, especially in Larsson’s use of glum surrealism and sudden tonal shifts. How much of these jarring effects are deliberate, and how much the result of film-making inexperience, is a moot point. But patient, open-minded viewers will enjoy the ride, even if the destination proves disappointing. A starry cast and puzzle-driven suspense plot should help secure audience interest beyond the festival circuit.

The unnamed mother of the title is played with an imperious swagger by venerable screen queen Burstyn. Evidently confused, possibly suffering from dementia or depression, this flinty matriarch has defiantly planted herself on a couch in a huge family furniture store, refusing to leave, giving no explanation why. This creates major anxiety for her middle-aged son David (McGregor), who is already on a tight time schedule with his own family commitments, though it does not seem to worry his louche older half-brother Gruff (Ifans), who is more interested in the pretty young storekeeper Bella (Russell). This unorthodox family therapy session is complete with the arrival of half-sister Linda (Boyle), a chain-smoking bad-ass vamp who keeps threatening to call 911, and shows limited patience for her mother’s intransigence.

While these semi-estranged half-siblings struggle to shift their immovable mother, David is sporadically summoned by his wife (Lake Bell) for daddy duties, resulting in a fraught father-daughter episode at the beach. Pressed into staying overnight at the furniture store to safeguard his mother, he finds himself befuddled by Bella’s flirtatious mind games, then further confounded by her affable father and chainsaw-wielding uncle, odd-couple twins both played by the perennially magnetic Abraham. Following a series of wounding revelations from Burstyn’s cold-blooded mother, who tells David she never wanted children and even tried to have him terminated during pregnancy, the film’s final act takes a wild swerve into heavily symbolic floods and a cryptic, apocalyptic banquet scene.

Mother, Couch! drops a ton of teaser clues and opaque hints that never really coalesce into a clear narrative whole. Are we watching an absurdist farce in the tradition of Beckett or Ionescu? A feverish hallucination unfolding inside David’s head? A satirical vision of purgatory as a giant Kafkaesque furniture warehouse? A darkly allegorical fable about family power dynamics? Multiple interpretations are possible, but Larsson’s meandering plot is mostly driven by David’s bumpy evolution from rejected, neglected man-child to autonomous adult. Along the way there are painful home truths and violent confrontations, plus a dash of heavy-handed Freudian symbolism that even Freud himself might consider a little too on the nose. And by nose, I obviously mean penis.

Even if it leans more towards ambitious failure than knockout debut, Larssen’s tonally wobbly tragicomedy still has much to recommend it, particularly the heady chemisty between that rich multi-generational cast. It is certainly refreshing to see McGregor having fun with a rumpled, downtrodden everyman instead of his usual blandly boyish hero roles. Relishing a rare chance to use his native Welsh accent, Ifans radiates appealingly seedy, earthy comic energy while Boyle’s trash-talking bleach-blonde diva is a pure joy. More screen time for her marginal character would have been very welcome. And while Burstyn remains a formidable heavyweight screen presence at 90, it is relative novice Russell who almost steals the film from everyone else with her wry, ambiguous, mischievous performance. Mother, Couch! may be less than the sum of its parts, but these are great parts.

Director: Niclas Larsson
Screenwriter: Niclas Larsson, from Mamma i Soffa by Jerker Virdbor
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rhys Ifans, Taylor Russell, Ellen Burstyn, Lara Flynn Boyle, F. Murray Abraham
Cinematography: Chayse Irvin
Editing: Carla Luffe
Music: Christopher Bear
Producers: Sara Murphy, Alex Black, Ella Bishop, Pau Suris, Katrin Pors
Production companies: Fat City (US), Film i Väst (Sweden), Snowglobe Film (Denmark)
World sales: Charades, Paris
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (New Directors)
In English
96 minutes

Despite two French stars the caliber of Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Devos fretting over how to handle a hot situation about to boil over, A Silence pretty much lives up to the mood suggested by its title: a long, painful delay until the big reveal scene which, when it happens, takes place off screen and in the dark. And just to make sure the act of violence doesn’t come as too much of a shock, it is anticipated in the first scene, a flash-forward to the police investigation. This Belgian-French-Luxembourg coprod bowed in San Sebastian’s Official Selection and will probably attract mainly Euro audiences for its sensitive, tasteful take on a bitter, tasteless topic.

Belgian auteur Joachim Lafosse (Private Property, Loving without Reason) is well-known to festival audiences for his stories of marriages on the verge of breakdown and families coming unglued, like his recent tale of a bipolar painter in The Restless. Here the couple is question have been married some 25 years and have a grown-up daughter living on her own and an adopted son in high school. Raphael (Matthieu Galoux), the son, is shaggy-haired and shifty-eyed, a rebel who has been cutting school and who obviously harbors a secret of some sort. Yet he puts up with his possessive mom Astrid (Devos), who showers him with money and the keys to her convertible. She also likes to dance close to him with her head on his shoulder, though this is merely a yellow light in the context of the film.

The red lights involve dad Francois (Auteuil), a fiery attorney who has spent years on the highly publicized case of two girls who were raped and murdered. Ironically, he himself has been in therapy for his pedophiliac urges, and it’s not just child pornography we’re talking about: his wife’s younger brother is threatening to press charges for rape when he was underage. Astrid naively tells herself all this is in the past and Francois has reformed. We wait for the cops to pick up the case and see where it leads.

Astrid is the central character around which the family starts to unwind. As her husband points out while his legal peril mounts, she is the only one who knows him and has forgiven him. Devos does a balancing act in scene after scene, trying to keep the ship afloat, and while one can understand her problem, it’s hard to find much sympathy for her. Auteuil, on the other hand, also walks a moral tightrope but is such a consummate actor, he makes it hard to take sides against him. As Raphael sagaciously notes, he can talk his way out of anything because people believe him.

The family residence, a sprawling country house on the outskirts of a city, is the main stage where the drama unfolds, along with the inside of cars, where more tense conversations are held than in your average Iranian movie. Here everyone seems to be driving somewhere in unseen traffic that slows the film down. Although there is an unnatural lack of servants (who does the cleaning, the ironing, the mowing?), perhaps to keep the family drama undiluted, the house is constantly under siege by a flurry of TV journalists with cameras and microphones. They actually sleep in their cars outside the estate’s gate, waiting to pounce on Francois about his court case. As a Greek chorus they’re one of the film’s more imaginative inventions.

Lafosse’s regular D.P Jean-Francois Hensgens surrounds the family in a seemingly impervious atmosphere of wealth and tranquility, with his gorgeous lighting and economy of shots that rarely move to follow the characters, but at the same time don’t draw attention to themselves. Seven different music credits are listed, creating a silky background score.

Director: Joachim Lafosse
Screenplay: Joachim Lafosse, Chloé Duponchelle, Paul Ismael
Cast: Emmanuelle Devos, Daniel Auteuil, Matthieu Galoux, Salomé Dewaels, Jeanne Cherhal
Producers: Anton Iffland Stettner, Jani Thiltges
Cinematography: Jean-Francois Hensgens
Editing: Damien Keyeux
Production design: Anna Falguères
Costume design: Isabel Van Renterghem
Music: Meredi , Hania Rani, Hannah Peele, Tepr , Michel Berger, Johann Johannsson, Olafur Arnalds
Sound: Alain Goniva, Françoist Dumon, Xavier Dujardin, Thomas Gauger
Production companies: Stenola Productions (Belgium), Samsa Film (Luxembourg), Les Films du Losange (France)
World Sales: Les Films du Losange
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Official Selection)
In French
100 minutes

Llámelo una utopía de ciencia ficción, o una fértil polinización cruzada de pensadoras a través del tiempo y el espacio, pero El sueño de la sultana lleva al público a un viaje de fantasía que es tan encantador como educativo.

Este largometraje de animación, el primero de la directora española Isabel Herguera está inspirado en una historia del mismo título de la profesora y escritora musulmana Rokeya Hossain (1880-1932), nacida en Bengala y trás negársele el entierro en un cementerio musulmán fue inhumada en el patio de un colegio. Después atrapar la atención en la Selección Oficial de San Sebastián, seguramente extenderá sus alas en festivales y casas de arte, siguiendo los pasos de clásicos de la animación feminista como Persépolis (2007) de Marjane Satrapi y No. 7 Cherry Lane (2019) de Yonfan.

Herguera y su coguionista Gianmarco Serra cuentan sus fantásticas historias a través de los ojos de una joven artista y cineasta mochilera, Inés, cuyos viajes entre España e India constituyen la columna vertebral de la película. El hecho de que cada rostro en la película esté coloreado de un cálido y rico tono marrón subraya la universalidad de esta historia y la conexión entre europeos e indios de diferentes razas y religiones; después de todo, es una historia que explora a hombres y mujeres.

Inicialmente, Inés va a Ahmadabad para ver a su excéntrico amante Amar, un artista cuya espontaneidad impulsiva hace que  a menudo se quede sola. En una secuencia, ella se pone un pañuelo blanco para visitar una mezquita con él, pero él se distrae jugando con unos niños y ella se encuentra rodeada por una pared de hombres de aspecto hostil y luego por un mar de mujeres con máscaras idénticas que cargan bebés. Una de ellas se identifica como francesa y le entrega una tarjeta de presentación en la que está escrito “Abogado”; la mujer afirma que ha encontrado la libertad en esta vida restringida.

En otra escena, Inés y su amiga india Sudanya van a Vrindavan, la ciudad del señor Krishna, también conocida como la Ciudad de las viudas. Aquí también encuentran una barrera cultural que les impide intercambiar ideas con un grupo de viudas hindúes vestidas de blanco reunidas en un pequeño templo. Sólo cuando Inés toma un autobús hacia Bangladesh siguiendo las huellas de Rokeya Hossain, las barreras se rompen, tanto en los proyectos educativos de la vida real de la escritora para las mujeres musulmanas de su época, como en su sueño de Ladyland, donde las mujeres llenan el calles y realizar todos los trabajos, a salvo de los hombres que son mantidos dentro de casa donde no puedan hacer daño.

Como era de esperar, la visión utópica de Ladyland, llena de aladas máquinas voladoras y alegres mujeres científicas, es lo más destacado de la película. Los dibujos 2D en tinta  y acuarela que dominan otras secciones de la película dan paso a complejos diseños decorativos repetitivos que utilizan técnicas tradicionales indias como Mehndi. La propia Rokeya aparece en la historia como una chica con trenzas que aprende bengalí e inglés antes de casarse a los 16 años y luego comienza una escuela para mujeres tras la temprana muerte de su marido.

Llama la atención que el tema de la seguridad de las mujeres sea tan recurrente. Al viajar en rickshaws, Inés a menudo parece incómoda, y sus temores se hacen realidad cuando el vehículo es atacado sin provocación por una banda de monos furiosos. Una mujer india sugiere con esperanza que al menos las mujeres están seguras en Europa, pero Inés responde que no están seguras en ningún lugar del mundo, y la película termina con una secuencia final aterradora que enfatiza esta negatividad.

Quizás, a diferencia de una fantasía excesiva como la ganadora del León de Oro de Venecia, Poor Things, El sueño de Sultana esté, a fin de cuentas  más arraigada en la realidad y conozca los peligros que plantea la incesante mirada masculina. Después de todo, ni siquiera Rokeya Hossain pudo encontrar mejor método para traer niñas a su escuela que esconderlas dentro de un carruaje  vestidas de negro de pies a cabeza. Y son muchos los momentos en los que Inés parece haber vencido las amenazas sexuales para vivir la vida que ella elije; de hecho, la creatividad misma del diseño animado levanta el ánimo. Pero hay una nube oscura en lo profundo de la historia que nunca desaparece por completo.

Esta es una película tejida con tantas hebras creativas que amenazan con soltarse permanentemente en el transcurso de los sueños, los viajes en el tiempo, las fantasías y todo lo demás. La intrépida Inés (con la sofisticada voz de Miren Arrieta) viaja por todo el mundo, conociendo a personas reales de hoy y de antaño.

Uno de ellos es Paul B. Preciado, el filósofo y escritor radical español (y director de la reciente película Orlando, Mi biografía política) que intercambia ideas con Inés y su madre oceanógrafa en una elegante exposición de arte. A través de sus viajes, Inés le escribe a Paul, quien la anima a soñar y experimentar con su vida.

Inés también tiene un padre llamativo inspirado/interpretado por el productor italiano Roberto Bessi, quien la lleva por Roma en la época de Hollywood en el Tíber, en el apogeo de Cinecittá, Fellini y Mastroianni, aunque Bollywood misteriosamente también figura en las extravagantes producciones de papá.

Un cameo especialmente encantador es el de la clasicista británica Dame Mary Beard, cuyo avatar animado cuenta una fascinante historia sobre “el primer hombre que le dijo a una mujer que se callara”. Este, en opinión de Beard, es Telémaco, el hijo de Odiseo en la antigua Grecia, quien envió a su madre Penélope de regreso al piso de arriba, a las habitaciones de las mujeres, cuando le pidió a un músico de la corte que tocara algo más alegre.

Director: Isabel Herguera
Guion: Isabel Herguera, Gianmarco Serra
Elenco voces: Miren Arrieta, Mary Beard, Mireia Gabilondo , Maurizio Faraoni, Manu Khurana, Arunima Bhattacharya, Ranjitha Rajeevan, Paul B. Preciado
Productores: Diego Herguera, Mariano Baratech, Chelo Loureiro, Ivan Minambres, Fabian Driehorst
Fotografía: Eduardo Elosegi
Edición: Gianmarco Serra
Mùsica: Moushumi Bhowmick, Tajdar Junaid
Sonido: Gianmarco Serra, Simon Bastian
Compañías productoras: Sultana Films (España), Gatoverde Producciones SL (España), Abano Produciones SL (España), Uniko Creative Studio (España), Fabian&Fred (Alemania)
Ventas internacionales: Square Eyes (Austria)
Muestra: Festival Internacional de Cine San Sebastian (Secciòn oficial)
En Bengalí, español, euskera, hindi, inglés e italiano
86 minutos

The film follows less than 24 hours in the life of Lali (Yael Elkana) from a nocturnal walk home, during which she is sexually assaulted by a supposed friend, to the following day and the implications of the attack. In the Tel Aviv back alley in which Lali is raped, she stares, unable to move, up at a bright light casting a lurid pall over the events. The next day, she attempts a similar strategy of dissociation to attempt to save herself from the pain of having to process what has happened to her. It’s a bracing, authentic and keenly observed depiction of a tragically common ordeal.

The rape sequence itself is handled delicately, initially shot in a long locked-off take that emphasises Lali’s vulnerability and isolation as her friend tries to take advantage of her lack of sobriety before forcing himself on her. With the attack in progress, the camera cuts to a close-up of Elkana’s performance, her determinedly blank stare as she tries to separate mind from body and escape the experience of the assault.

Elkana is brilliant when she portrays Lali during the following day, teetering on the brink – resolutely trying to brush off the impact of the events, snapping at her caring housemate Ori (Ben Ze’ev Rabain) when he makes too much of a fuss. She is strong-willed but there are chinks in the armour, moments in which pent-up energies threaten to come rushing down like a torrent. The emotional apex of Atary’s film comes in a piano performance by Lali at the music school that she and Ori attend the following day – and where her attacker sits just a few seats away in the classroom. Conveyed by the melody and the mournful edge to the lyrics, the walls begin to crack.

Shot in a cool daylight that juxtaposes pointedly with the orangey streetlights of the night before, the daytime sequences bring the events into the glare of stark reality – the very shot short of the man who raped Lali convey unambiguously the beginnings of guilt about what he did. However, Single Light is not interested in the lament of the abuser, but in portraying the stomach-churning aftermath for a woman subjected to such an attack, and it does so with consummate aplomb.

Director, screenplay, music: Shaylee Atary
Cast: Yael Elkana, Ben Ze’ev Rabain
Producers:
Cinematography: Omar Weiss
Editing: Noa Gottesman
Sound: Rotem Dror
Production company: Encore Films (Israel)
Sales: Go2Films (Israel)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Zabaltegi-Tabakalera)
In Hebrew
29 minutes

World premiering in competition in San Sebastian this week, Kalak is a handsomely crafted co-production between Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Greenland and the Netherlands. The story’s unsparing bleakness will doubtless limit its potential audience appeal, but high-calibre performances, thoughtful treatment of serious themes, and visually stunning Greenlandic locations are all strong selling points. There are moments of levity and beauty in the darkness here, elevating Eklöf’s emotionally charged psycho-drama above the usual glut of misery porn that typically score festival slots before disappearing into art-house obscurity. Leine’s fame and acclaim in Scandinavia could also help boost the film’s regional prospects.

Kalak mostly takes place in the former Danish colony of Greenland at the dawn of the 21st century. Jan (Emil Johnsen) is a nurse on the run from his painful childhood in Denmark, notably his sexually abusive father Ole (Soren Hellerup). Outwardly, he appears to have made a success of his adult life, sharing a warm family nest with his supportive wife Lærke (Asta Kamma August) and two pre-teen children. But his damaged, needy nature keeps drawing him into high-risk situations, working through his past trauma on some level through a series of messy sexual entanglements with Greenlandic women, which Lærke initially tolerates with infinite good grace.

Immersing himself in the local language and customs, Jan dreams of becoming a “Kalak”, a slang term for “real” or “dirty” Greenlander, which can be both insult and compliment. With the decades-deep resentment common to most colonised peoples, the natives treat his dubiously flattering interest with a mix of pity, contempt and ritual deference. In reality, deep down, Jan is craving a sense of belonging, a healing human connection, an escape route from solitude and self-loathing. In a bitter wake-up call, the long-suffering Greenlandic women he pursues share his crushing loneliness and, in many cases, similar back stories of sexual violence too. Indeed, by comparison to sharp-clawed single mother Karine (Berda Larsen) and fragile lost soul Ella (Connie Kristoffersen), his First World problems start to look pretty minor.

When Jan’s sexual misadventures fail to cure his incurable sickness, he turns to self-medicating with drugs stolen from his hospital workplace. After a series of horrific accidents leave him alone in Greenland, he spirals into an addiction that almost kills him. But just as all-consuming tragedy seems inevitable, Kalak takes a more cautiously hopeful turn. A final reckoning between Jan and his dying father is a horribly authentic matter-of-fact portrait of a cheerfully unrepentant paedophile, still proudly insisting he shared mutually loving relationships with his victims, and dismissing anyone who observes common laws of consent as dreary prisoners of convention. When Jan eventually achieves a kind of closure with the monster who destroyed his life, it feels like both a noble act of kindness and a quietly ruthless act of revenge. Not quite victory, not quite redemption, but release at last from endlessly restaging his childhood nightmares.

While Kalak obviously does not offer feel-good entertainment, it is a compelling and handsome drama with serious points to make about trauma and recovery. Crucially, despite its gruelling themes, this close-up character study of a deeply dysfunctional anti-hero never becomes too earnest or sombre. Jan’s amoral antics are presented in an impressively non-judgemental and non-sensational manner, leavened by moments of dark humour and lively musical interludes, with Nadim Carlson’s majestic wide shots of the ruggedly beautiful Greenlandic landscapes a stand-out feature.

Johnsen’s layered performance, perpetually holding back tears behind a rueful smile and hunched body language, is a virtuosic lesson in conveying inner spiritual defeat with minimal words. Great work by his female co-stars ensure that Kalak is bigger than just one man’s emotional journey, and a sobering reminder that victims sometimes behave like abusers too.

Director: Isabella Eklöf
Screenwriters: Isabella Eklöf, Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen, Kim Leine
Cast: Emil Johnsen, Asta Kamma August, Berda Larsen, Aviana Heuser, Soren Hellerup, Klemens Christensen, Maka Abelsen, Malik Berglund Davidsen,
Cinematography: Nadim Carlsen
Editing: Anna Eborn, Isabella Eklöf
Producers: Maria Ekerhovd, David Herdies, Kristina Börjeson, Ilona Tolmunen, Erik Glijnis, Emile Hertling Péronard
Production companies: Manna Film (Denmark), Mer Film (Norway), Momento Film (Sweden), Film I Vast (Sweden), Made (Finland), Lemming Film (Netherlands), Polarama (Greenland)
World sales: Totem Films (France)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Danish, Greenlandic, English, Kalaallisut
125 minutes

Call it utopian sci fi, or the fertile cross-pollination of women thinkers across time and space, but Sultana’s Dream (El sueño de la sultana) takes the audience on a fantasy journey that is as delightful as it is educational.

This animated feature film, Spanish director Isabel Herguera’s first long-form work, is inspired by a story of the same title by Muslim teacher and writer Rokeya Hossain (1880-1932), born in Bengal and buried in the courtyard of a school because she was refused the Muslim cemetery. After catching attention in San Sebastian’s Official Selection, it is bound to spread its wings over festivals and art houses, following in the footsteps of such feminist animation classics as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) and Yonfan’s No. 7 Cherry Lane (2019).

Herguera and co-screenwriter Gianmarco Serra tell their fantastic stories through the eyes of a young back-packing artist and filmmaker, Inés, whose trips between Spain and India form the backbone of the film. The fact that every face in the film is colored a warm, rich brown underlines the universality of this story and the connection between Europeans and Indians of different races and religions – it’s a story exploring men and women, after all.

Initially, Inès goes to Ahmadabad to see her eccentric lover Amar, an artist whose impulsive spontaneity often leaves her on her own. In one sequence she dons a white headscarf to visit a mosque with him, but he gets distracted playing with some children and she finds herself surrounded by a wall of hostile-looking men, then by a sea of identically masked women cradling infants. One of them identifies herself as a Frenchwoman and hands her a business card, on which is written Attorney; the woman claims she has found freedom in this restricted life.

In another scene, Inés and her Indian friend Sudanya go to Vrindavan, the city of Lord Krsna, also known as the City of Widows. Here, too, they find a cultural wall that prevents them from exchanging ideas with a group of white-robed Hindi widows gathered in a small temple. It is only when Inés takes a bus to Bangladesh on the track of Rokeya Hossain that the barriers break down, both in the writer’s real-life educational projects for the Muslim women of her day, and in her dream of Ladyland, where women fill the streets and perform all the jobs, safe from the men who are kept at home where they can do no harm.

As might be expected, the utopian vision of Ladyland, filled with winged flying machines and joyful women scientists, is a highlight of the film. The 2D ink and watercolor drawings prevalent in other sections of the film give way to the intricacies of repetitive decorative designs using traditional Indian techniques like Mehndi. Rokeya herself appears in the story as a pigtailed girl who learns Bengali and English before getting married at 16, then starts a school for women when her husband dies young.

It is striking that the theme of women’s safety is so recurrent. Riding around in rickshaws, Inés often seems uneasy, and her fears are literalized when the vehicle is attacked without provocation by a band of furious monkeys. One Indian woman suggests hopefully that at least women are safe in Europe, but Inés replies they are safe nowhere in the world, and the film ends with a frightening final sequence that emphasizes this negativity.

Perhaps – unlike a far-out fantasy like the Venice Golden Lion winner Poor Things – Sultana’s Dream is, in the end, just more grounded in reality and knows the dangers posed by the ceaseless male gaze. After all, even Rokeya Hossain could find no better method to bring girls to her school than hiding them away inside a carriage draped in black from head to toe. And there are many moments when Inés seems to  have conquered sexual threats to live a life of her choosing; in fact, the very creativity of the animated design lifts the spirits. But there is a dark cloud deep in the story that never completely goes away.

This is a film woven out of so many creative threads, they threaten to come permanently loose in the course of dreams, time travel, fantasies and everything else. The fearless Inés (sophisticatedly voiced by Miren Arrieta) journeys around the globe, meeting real-life people of today as well as yesteryear. One of them is Paul B. Preciado, the radical Spanish philosopher and writer (and director of the recent film Orlando, My Political Biography) who exchanges ideas with inés and her oceanographer mother at a chic art show. Throughout her travels Inés writes to Paul, who encourages her to dream and experiment with her life.

Inés also has a flashy father modeled on/played by Italian producer Roberto Bessi, who drives her around Rome at the time of Hollywood on the Tiber, in the heyday of Cinecittà, Fellini and Mastroianni – though Bollywood mysteriously also figures into Dad’s extravagant productions.

An especially delightful cameo belongs to British classicist Dame Mary Beard, whose animated avatar tells a riveting story about “the first man who told a woman to shut up.” This, in Beard’s estimation, is Telemachus, the son of Odysseus in ancient Greece, who sent his mom Penelope back upstairs to the women’s quarters when she asked a court musician to play something more cheery.

Director: Isabel Herguera
Screenplay: Isabel Herguera, Gianmarco Serra
Voice cast: Miren Arrieta, Mary Beard, Mireia Gabilondo , Maurizio Faraoni, Manu Khurana, Arunima Bhattacharya, Ranjitha Rajeevan, Paul B. Preciado
Producers: Diego Herguera, Mariano Baratech, Chelo Loureiro, Ivan Minambres, Fabian Driehorst
Cinematography: Eduardo Elosegi
Editing: Gianmarco Serra
Music: Moushumi Bhowmick, Tajdar Junaid
Sound: Gianmarco Serra, Simon Bastian
Production companies: Sultana Films (Spain), Gatoverde Producciones SL (Spain), Abano Produciones SL (Spain), Uniko Creative Studio (Spain), Fabian&Fred (Germany)
World Sales: Square Eyes (Austria)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Official selection)
In Bengali, Spanish, Basque, Hindi, English, Italian
86 minutes

They Shot the Piano Player is a love letter to a revolutionary period in Brazilian pop culture, but also a specific memorial to Francisco Tenório Júnior, a pioneering pianist during the bossa nova boom that erupted across Rio in the late 1950s, becoming a worldwide craze in the 1960s. Tenório was a composer and band leader but mostly a virtuoso sideman, playing with giants of the era like Milton Nascimento, Gal Costa and Vinícius de Moraes. He managed to survive under the right-wing military dictatorship that seized power in Brazil from 1964 onwards, sending many of his peers into jail or exile, but he later fell victim to another.

In March 1976, during a tour, Tenório left his Buenos Aires hotel on a short errand and never returned. The full details of his disappearance are still vague, but most accounts agree he was picked up by Argentina’s military police, detained, tortured and executed. Almost at random, he became one of around 30,000 innocents murdered by the junta during their decade-long “dirty war”. He was 34 years old.

As spoiler-heavy titles go, They Shot the Piano Player lands pretty squarely on the nose, at least in its more direct English-language translation. But it was obviously too tempting as both concise plot summary and winking Francois Truffaut homage, underscoring the parallels that Trueba and Marisca draw between Brazilian bossa nova and French cinema’s contemporaneous nouvelle vague movement – both translate as “new wave”, of course. There are no great shock revelations here in the vein of Searching for Sugar Man (2012), but the directors are opening up this half-forgotten story to a wider and younger global audience, adding extra emotional shading and personal memories from friends, lovers, family members and former musical contemporaries of the late piano maestro.

Trueba and Marisca originally planned to make a straight documentary about Tenório, and some of that undiluted interview material survives in They Shot the Piano Player, framed here as the journalistic investigations of author Jeff Harris, voiced by Goldblum in typically wry style. Among the Brazilian musical icons who share their memories on screen are Gilberto Gil, Gaetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento and many more. Thanks to the infinite fantastical possibilities of animation, there are also fleeting cameos here by Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Jean-Luc Godard, Stan Getz and others. Blending animated interview clips with archive flashbacks and speculative reconstruction, the film’s patchwork structure becomes loopy and disjointed in places, constantly revisiting the same events. Multiple inspired set-piece scenes stand out, even if the overall narrative through-line never quite coheres.

A little more light is thrown on Tenório’s final days in a vintage interview clip with a former Argentinian corporal, who claims the musician was most likely snatched from the street based on his long-haired hippie appearance, possibly even a victim of mistaken identity. He was then taken to the notorious Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), the largest clandestine detention and torture centre in Argentina during the junta years. Despite espousing fairly apolitical views, his bohemian artist lifestyle would have automatically been deemed a sign of suspiciously leftist sympathies. With apparent permission from Brazilian security services, it appears Tenorio was shot dead by the infamous “angel of death”, Argentine navy captain and mass murderer Alfredo Astiz. In 2011, Astiz was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity.

They Shot the Piano Player is stilted in places, with chunks of clunky exposition and political background context dropped clumsily into the narrative. But it is also packed with information, visually ravishing and rich in human interest, with clear appeal beyond specialist music-fan circles. It works both as instant primer on bossa nova jazz-pop and an entry-level history lesson for curious students of Latin America’s troubled Cold War decades, when military dictatorships like those in Brazil and Argentina were covertly suppported by the CIA and US government.

Given its tragic central theme, They Shot the Piano Player could have been a sombre memorial, but Trueba and Marisca make sure it plays like a life-affirming celebration of Tenório’s generous spirit and musical legacy. The soundtrack, as we might expect, is a pure gold, densely woven with music by its subject and his peers, still sounding as fresh and fragrant as a perfumed ocean breeze.

Directors: Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal
Screenplay: Fernando Trueba
Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Tony Ramos, Abel Ayala, Roberta Wallach, Angela Rabelo, Stephen Hughes
Producers: Cristina Huete, Serge Laloand, Sophie Cabon, Bruno Felix, Janneke van der Kerkhof, Femke Wolling, Humberto Santana
Animation director: Carlos León Sancha
Editing: Arnau Quiles Pascuai
Production company: Fernando Trueba PC SA (Spain)
World sales: Film Constellation (London)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (special screenings)
In English, Portuguese
103 minutes