- You've gone to see the Galician film. The lights go off and the projection starts. The first thing that surprises you is that they talk to you with Asian faces and then with Chinese faces. You look at the sides, you see special movements in the armchairs. The first viewer has risen before the fourth second, and has left the room at a dizzying speed, without startling. Then another one. After a tension break, three more people head towards the door, and as if it had triggered the fire alarm, dozens of spectators jump to the exit door. You also start to move nervous, to decide whether or not you leave. All of a sudden, all those who have left return like dead bodies raised from heaven to earth. "Before there's a short one," you hear it.
This is the short film, precisely, Xia wu guo le yi ban, which is broadcast in the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section. Director Zhang Dalak has focused his work on the family environment, to tell a grandson's back home. Xiao returns home from his grandfather Lei and, although nothing has changed, everything has become outdated. Between his outside world and the inside world there may be a chasm, or there is no room for anything. In their relationship with the grandfather, there is sometimes a loss of patience, and in other occasions there is affinity. It is a film that is treated intimately in the relationship of kinship, possibly related to personal relationships.
The American film Mass was the second of the day in what is going to be a festival. The film is directed and directed by Fran Kranz and is in the new directors’ section. The film portrays the encounter between two couples of parents who are afflicted by the terrible event, with the intention of moving towards the solution of their pain. The film takes place, to a large extent, in a single room, where they have decided to speak. The device is well thought out because it is from this room where the narration of what happened is made in a non-chronological way, filling the gaps and putting the tensions on the desktop. The film has a naive side, an opinion that such a conflict can only be resolved in a conversation. However, it manages to maintain tension and curiosity throughout the film and catches the viewer. Although it is perceived that the knot has to let go, it is explained with complexity the experience of each party in a fact of this type, and the complexity is never clarified, but each one thinks. This is a film counted from the Baztan Valley.
Finally, the program is completed with the movie Night of Fire, from the section Horizontes latinos. Set in a small village in Mexico, it has as context the continuous threats of the posters and the police. Director Tatiana Huezo has as protagonists three girls who protect each other against the tension experienced in the village. Citizens are beheaded and dressed in children's clothes to prevent the kidnappings of girls, and everyone has a hideout "when they come". It is a very busy film about the taboo of these situations, the status of women, the brutality of patriarchal society and the world of children. The film brings us to that particular universe, and between bitter and painful, it also shows us the power of the dreamed games. After this, let's take a look at the second half of the week.