The new voices of Spanish auteur cinema: “Why not apply for this Christmas film?” | Cinema: premieres and evaluations | EUROtoday

Those on the lookout for new sensations on the Christmas billboard can change the predictable fantasy of Avatar: hearth and ash for 2 good head flips: Balearic, by Ion de Sosa (San Sebastián, 44 years outdated), and Ariel, by Lois Patiño (Vigo, 42 years outdated). Friends and collaborators, the San Sebastian native and the Galician defend their very own voice within the renewed Spanish auteur cinema. A label that each premieres come to develop. “Why not apply as this Christmas movie? Eleven euros seems very cheap to me for what you’re going to get when you come out of watching ours,” De Sosa begins along with his typical humor, conscious of his battle in opposition to Goliath. “And they also have something fantastical about them, they awaken a parallel imaginary universe,” Patiño seconds.

No one higher than themselves to promote them. In order of launch: Balearic, already in theaters, it’s preceded by the applause on the Márgenes competition, the place it gained the viewers award and a particular point out from the jury. Like so many works that matter, it has polarized critics: it irritates some and fascinates others. De Sosa presents a two for one, it begins like a survival horror youth to embed one other movie inside, the place it illustrates the specter of that bourgeois grownup world delivered to an ethical anesthesia within the fashion of The exterminating angel. The imminent catastrophe, dormant below a blinding summer time panorama, flows from the darkish affect of the swimming pools, a symbolic portal that connects each tragedies. “There is an intergenerational reading: what did you let die to be the person you are now. In my meetings with producers, I said that when you are 18, you want to change the world and when you are 40, you want a swimming pool,” says its creator, who opts for denaturalized dialogues and dry sarcasm to generate even higher strangeness. “I have realized that I am ashamed to show feelings. In my films no one cries and if they laugh, they do so in a grotesque way. We try to make dialogues that contain a mystery in themselves, almost self-contained.”

In that plural he refers to his script companions: Chema García Ibarra (director of holy spirit), Juan González (from the duo Burnin’ Percebes) and Julián Génisson and Lorena Iglesias (from Canódromo Abandonado). Innovators of cinematographic language who’re joined by a gaggle of performers exterior the performing canon such because the singer Christina Rosenvinge, the post-porn artist María Llopis or Héctor Arnau, former vocalist of Las Víctimas Civiles.

The two movies share a couple of thinks a priori. To start with, the attention of Ion de Sosa, who additionally indicators the magnetic {photograph} of Ariel, by Lois Patiño (its theatrical launch on December 24). In this one, the limbo wherein the characters reside is a Portuguese island the place everybody wakes up, which isn’t any small factor, to recite Shakespeare’s works. Everything responds to that nice theater of the world that’s The storm, probably the most baroque work of the English bard, the place to begin of this existentialist and sensorial comedy starring Agustina Muñoz and Irene Escolar. Patiño was going to movie with the Argentine Matías Piñeiro, however their collaboration couldn’t be resulting from dates. With the financing already inexperienced, he was confronted with the dilemma of letting it drop or tackling it on his personal, regardless of the shift to his typical non secular and contemplative fashion.

From Costa da Morte (2013) till Samsara (2023), in his movies “there are traces of souls in the landscape”, because the Portuguese poet Teixeira de Pascoaes outlined. “I risked putting the coherence of my career in doubt, but I have always preferred to take risks and learn, rather than not do. I have jumped from Samsara, which was an anthropological documentary, to theatrical fiction, which is almost the opposite. I go to fiction, but without completely believing it. I put a conceptual, metanarrative distance. For me, the ambiguous space between the real and the spectral, or in this case the real and fiction, is the most fertile,” he reflects.

Where everything was silence, distance and reflective voices in Lois Patiño’s cinema, now there are dialogues, short shots and even the breaking of the fourth wall. Much of that, he confesses, has come from working with Ion de Sosa. “I’ve at all times been shy about bringing the digicam so near the characters. The good factor is that now I understand how to include it into my vocabulary.” His colleague gives him a pragmatic answer: “Since I’ve at all times had such low budgets, I shoot on what I management, the faces. I owe Lois a lesson within the intangible, these issues that in precept one doesn’t understand and take longer to ponder. Because I’m extra of ‘Like that, growth!'”

They agree that these are their most ambitious projects, commercially speaking. They met at the Locarno festival in 2013. De Sosa attended as co-producer and director of photography of The future, by Luis López Carrasco. Patiño, with Costa da Morte, his debut feature, which earned him the award for Best Emerging Director and placed him as a banner of Novo Cinema Galego along with his friend Oliver Laxe. “We have been on the competition circuit for greater than a decade, fortunately, with good progress. Our efforts have been in exploring the cinematographic language to blow up it and uncover new issues, however we need to attain different home windows, attain extra audiences,” they reason almost in unison. During the talk comes the news of the nomination of Sirât to the Golden Globes. “Oliver has managed to leap simply that barrier. He has made an exquisite journey with out giving up his id and has discovered the general public. It is a phenomenal mirror wherein to have a look at your self,” they point out.

De Sosa has become one of the most interesting directors of photography in our country. That is seen in New Age, Irati Gorostidi’s stimulating debut feature. And in Filmin they are the remake ultralow cost of Blade Runner in Benidorm, titled Androids dream (2014) y Mamantula (2023), a wonderful delirium starring a killer tarantula from outer space disguised as a human. His feverish activity and recognition among his professional colleagues contrast with his difficulties in making a living from cinema. At the age of 27, he moved to Berlin. “I appeared up which was the most cost effective capital in Europe at the moment. I paid 340 euros for an condo. I labored very laborious for 10 years in a pizzeria. With what I saved, I paid for my first three films.” In the first, the autofiction documentary True love, He invested 20,000 euros.

It’s the same thing that cost Patino Costa da Morte. “I had the reference of my parents, abstract painters [los creadores del movimiento Atlántica Antón Patiño y Menchu Lamas]. My temperament comes from them do it yourself. I did almost everything: photography, editing… And I was looking for artistic creation scholarships and film subsidies. Depending on whether they gave me one or the other, I said it was video art or experimental cinema. And always with a philosophy that I later heard from Godard: if you only have five dollars, make films that cost five dollars.”

Journey to the commercial

In their thoughtful turn to the commercial, their next projects await them. Patiño is working with producer María Zamora, a national film award winner, on his largest filming, which will take him to the Philippines. “In it I return to the animist universe, however inside a big fiction. It is one thing I’d not have dared to do if it had not been for the leap into the void that it has entailed. Ariel: the staging, the route of actors, the psychological development of the characters…”

De Sosa is as soon as once more co-writing with Chema García Ibarra one thing they’ve provisionally titled, Devastated areas. “It’s a highschool drama the place a scholar hides one thing darkish. And after I say drama, I say it with full consciousness, as a result of this time I’m going for a linear movie. One of the massive obstacles we have come throughout Balearic is to search out distribution, as a result of it doesn’t play a selected, recognizable and, subsequently, marketable code at first. “I have promised myself to give one more twist towards what is accessible.”