A Film a Week - Truck Driver / Camionero

 previously published on Cineuropa

Roads resemble the blood vessels of the physical world. Most of the things we need, use and accumulate reach us by road, at least in part. Roads also take us places, provide us with adventures and show us the world. There is a whole genre of cinema dedicated solely to roads, travel and all the things that can happen along the way. But is a road movie even imaginable without relying on the road itself, and driving, as its main action? Francisco Marise certainly tries to do just that with his docu-fiction hybrid Truck Driver, which has just premiered in Karlovy Vary's Proxima competition.

As the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt famously said, music consists not only of tones, but also of pauses. The same could, in theory, be applied to Marise's approach to roads, driving and travel: motion is the tone, while stillness is the pause. In practice, this means the filmmaker focuses on the quieter moments and the places truckers frequent when they aren't driving – places like truck stops, diners, motels, perhaps a mechanic's garage or a tyre shop, but also the inside of the cabins, where the drivers spend most of their free time, soothing themselves to sleep with videos watched on a phone screen, or speaking to the family members they miss.

The important thing here is that each motivation is individual, whether it stems from past trauma or present-day hardship. The same holds true for fate, with two possible outcomes: surrendering to fatigue, or pressing on because there is no other choice. Marise certainly tries to capture the fuller picture of truck drivers' lives on the road (specifically in Argentina) but also to highlight particular situations through vignettes.

The way the filmmaker sets his film apart from the bulk of similar work – usually shot in the register of observational documentary – is through a conscious decision to show the road as little as possible, using driving merely as a backdrop to the truckers' thoughts and musings on the everyday topics that occupy them. In the film's opening stretch, this decision seems to land like a bullseye: cinematographer Jorge Rojas shoots mostly single-take scenes, always from just the right angle, while the editing duo of the filmmaker and Mayra Morán stitches them together with long, soft crossfades that lend the film an almost experimental quality.

However, once the novelty of this approach wears off – around the one-third mark – the cracks begin to show. The trouble is that Marise aimed higher than he could actually reach, attempting to proverbially reinvent the wheel on a topic that, while possibly fascinating, is still fairly familiar, all while trying to capture a trucker's life from every conceivable angle. That may be why he settled on a vignette structure that cuts too shallow, with barely any connective tissue between segments, even as recurring "characters" reappear.

In the end, the structure is so loose it borders on non-existent, and the whole thing resembles an arbitrarily assembled mosaic of clichés. Truck Driver ends up as a missed opportunity, albeit with some nice touches here and there.

A Film a Week - Rita

 previously published on Cineuropa

The greatest thing that Spanish actress-turned-filmmaker Paz Vega has done with her directorial debut, Rita, is that she convinces the audience that they are watching one movie until the very end, when it turns into something quite different. Rita has just premiered on Locarno’s Piazza Grande. Given the star power of Vega, here fulfilling a four-fold role (that of writer, helmer, actress in a prominent part and executive producer), and the urgency of its topic, it could gain some more festival exposure, a theatrical release in the Spanish-speaking world, and then end up on television worldwide.

The titular protagonist is a seven-year-old girl (played by magnetic newcomer Sofía Allepuz) who lives in Seville with her family, consisting of the taxi-driver father José Manuel (Roberto Álamo, glimpsed in supporting roles in numerous Spanish films), homemaker mother Mari (the filmmaker herself) and younger brother Lolo (Alejandro Escamilla). The year is 1984, it’s late spring, and the Spanish national football team is doing well in the European Championship tournament, which seems to be the father’s main preoccupation.

In the meantime, Rita spends most of her time playing with her brother or with her neighbour of the same age, Nito (Daniel Navarro), or being taken care of by her mother or by their neighbour Chari (Paz de Alarcón) when the mother has to run errands or visit the ailing grandmother. As we watch the events unfold from her sensitive, yet playful, perspective, we observe certain things: her dad’s quick temper and negative attitude towards the world, but especially towards the mother; her mum's initially silent, but later more vocal, despair; and her brother’s fear and panic attacks whenever the parents argue. All of this leads to the notion that home is not necessarily a safe place (especially for her mother) and that Rita’s growing up is no fairy tale.

Allepuz is a perfect choice for the role of Rita because of her natural energy that easily transforms into an organic chemistry with her acting partners, both the children and the adults. Álamo does a great job of hiding José Manuel’s menace behind a façade of the typical blue-collar blues, while Vega offers a master class in playing Mari’s sadness – that of a woman unable to do a single thing about her misfortune.

Apart from her acting talent, which we have also witnessed in more than 70 previous roles, in Rita, Vega also demonstrates a knack for storytelling, both as a writer and as a director. Her script is cleverly written and masterfully controlled by her directing, with a good sense of visual narration. She uses simple tricks such as the levitating camera movements in Eva Díaz Iglesias’s cinematography and an abundant use of lower angles to mimic the perspective of a child. The editing by Ana Álvarez-Ossorio keeps the pace at a moderate level, while the score on piano with some orchestration by Pablo Cervantes further accentuates the dreaminess and the gentleness associated with a carefree childhood.

The end result is something akin to a collection of detailed, yet diffuse, memories constructed around a series of events that the child protagonist could only see as low-intensity ones. However, darker tones are always subtly hinted at, and gradually introduced and amplified. By the end of the film, those innuendos converge into a striking, harrowing picture of abuse, making Rita an unpleasant, yet necessary, wake-up call.

A Film a Week - Piety / La Piedad

 previously published on Cineuropa

Eduardo Casanova’s second feature, Piety, is a film like no other, for better or for worse. His debut, the 2017 Berlinale title Skins, certainly was excessive, but with Piety, Casanova brings the excess to the next level in order to tell a deep and necessary, realistic story in a completely unrealistic, fantastic and allegorical manner. It has premiered in KVIFF’s new Proxima competition, but its next stop, Fantasia in Montreal, could actually decide its destiny because Piety is something that would theoretically suit fantastic festivals better than arthouse ones.

Casanova opens his film like a thriller, with a pulsating score, close-ups on the clock, and cuts that add to the tension just to throw his first of many curveballs in the title sequence. Printing the title in both Spanish and Korean, one might assume that he is actually paying the tribute to the recently deceased filmmaker Kim Ki-duk and his 2012 film of the same name, but the function of the Korean is something else that will be revealed later. Kim’s Pieta was certainly weird, and so is Casanova’s, but it is another kind of weirdness we are dealing with here.

Mateo (Manel Llunell) lives in a pink-and-pastels-covered world that seems like something straight out of musicals and is ruled by his mother, Libertad (Ángela Molina, seen in a number of Pedro Almodóvar films). Ironically, liberty is something Mateo does not enjoy, since he is a grown man relegated to the role of her little boy that she takes in tow to her musical rehearsals, and asks for insincere feedback about anything from the quality of her performance to the quality of her cooking. She also gives him baths, clips his nails and regulates his diet. Their days usually end with the news from North Korea (the plot of the film is set in 2011, the year of Kim Jong-il’s death) and they go to sleep in the same king-size bed.

When they learn about Mateo’s cancer diagnosis, Libertad tries to firm his grip over him, while he makes his best efforts to break free from her. Also, the people on North Korean news, a couple fleeing to South Korea when the authorities poisoned one of their daughters and executed the other one, find their way into the film in short excerpts, but Casanova has even stranger stuff in store for us: not so subtle hints at incest, breastfeeding and giving birth to a grown man in a nightmarish dream sequence.

There is no box Piety could be put to, since its elements are basically different types of bizarre, so maybe a description of something that would come out of the mind of Álex de la Iglesia if he would wake up in a pastel-coloured rehab centre is the most fitting one. The question, however, is whether the best way to treat such an important and complex topic as the co-dependence a person forms with a dictatorial regime, whether it rules a household or a country, is an exercise in excess.

On the other hand, Casanova demonstrates a unique and singular vision, the steel will to pursue it and some of the necessary skills to do so, such as envisioning and executing a proper genre movie set piece. Also, the counter-intuitive colour scheme used to portray the freedom and captivity and North and South Korea is an obvious metaphor, but also a nice touch. In the end, not all of Piety’s ingredients blend well together, but some parts of the film are really hard to forget.

A Film a Week - Disturbed Earth

 previously published on Cineuropa

Wars destroy countries, communities and individual lives, even for those who physically survive. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 90s still has repercussions today. It is still a heavy topic, especially around important dates such as 11 July, the date of the Srebrenica genocide, but the narrative in the mainstream media on every side almost exclusively revolves around nations, ethnic or religious groups, and rarely around individuals and their destinies.

That is not the case in Disturbed Earth by Kumjana Novakova and Guillermo Carreras-Candi, one of the films having its world premiere in the Sarajevo Film Festival’s Documentary Competition. As stated on the introductory title card, collective pain is made of personal losses and sorrows. Given the significance of its topic and the freshness of its style, the film does not have any trouble communicating with international audiences, and further festival exposure is to be expected.

The film begins with a brief introduction shot at the 20^th anniversary of the genocide (in 2015). We follow a truck decorated with a flag and flowers, carrying coffins which contain recently exhumed earthly remains of people killed 20 years ago, before witnessing the encounter between the vehicle and the families of the killed and the proper burial of the remains, seeking to secure eternal peace for the dead. The filmmaking duo then shifts its focus towards three survivors, whose difficult daily lives are marked by the sadness caused by loss and hard labour. Srećko is a man who came back to live off the woods around his house, on a hill just above Srebrenica. During the war, he was conscripted into the army of Republika Srpska and therefore forced to facilitate the war crimes against his neighbours. Mirza survived Srebrenica by hiking across the mountains for days to Tuzla. He is now back to his old house together with his wife to live off the land, since there are no jobs. Mejra lost her husband and sons, she is now 85 years old and still lives off the land.

The observations of their routines are intercut with archival material from the time of the war crimes and shortly afterwards, some of it notorious and some not known at all, as well as by title cards of two types. Some of them, written by Kumjana Novakova, serve as a poetic narration of sorts, and the tone of the cards is lyrical, even elegiac. The second group of cards is more matter-of-fact, since its authors are the protagonists themselves, sharing their observations, thoughts and memories about death and life.

Emotions are concentrated in a very compact runtime of just over 70 minutes, but Disturbed Earth does not feel rushed at all. It is in fact meditative, thanks in part to the combination of analogue and digital cinematography by Novakova and Carreras-Candi and the hypnotic editing by Jelena Maksimović. The choice of archival material is loaded with symbolism, while the finely-tuned sound design by Oriol Gallart Miret and his scarce employment of eerie music at just the right moments adds up to the atmosphere of general unpleasantness and sadness. Disturbed Earth transposes its viewer to a specific state of mind and emotion necessary to understand and feel individual tragedies and collective pain.