Lee Changdong has brought to the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section of the Zinemaldia an emotional masterpiece. Heartbeat is an eight-year short that tells the story of Chun, a child of only thirty minutes. Concerned about the well-being of her depressed mother, Chun rises from the classroom table and runs away from school. She wants to make sure her mother is still alive in her house.

Small formats and protagonists, huge themes and fears. Heartbeat is engraved in a single 30-minute plane. From the moment we are aware of Chun’s responsibility, the film lets us aerate, Changdong’s signature is usually the conjecture of abrupt issues. In the shortcut that brings us from school to home, we only see in the foreground the face of the child. In Chun we identify with the flocks of discomfort and crying, as both the noisy city and the carefree street visitors are blurred at the back of the screen. So, a camera at the height of the child's face invites us to denaturalize the adult world, our world. How is it possible that little Chun has to endure this? And beyond that, how is it possible that someone has to endure this?

Lee Changdong talks about violence that should not spill over the world of children; in the case of Chun, his mother’s illness and the situation of a striking father who has just lost his job. The director extends resentment to the extreme, until, at the last moment, he releases the dramatic knot through a simple camera movement. For the first time, the child's face is forgotten, and the camera is slowly climbing up to find his mother's face. So when we see the mother for the first time, we start to imagine the ones that are also on the ribs. We identify with their pain. Thus, we remember that the life of a woman who seemed to be blamed for Chun's concern, like that of the child, is also permeated by daily violence.

 

Longer duration, slower development and complicated mounting are the features of the first feature film by Manto de Gemas Natalia López Gallardo, compared to Heartbeat. With Changdongenia he competes in the department of Zabaltegi-Tabakalera, where we also have unfortunate mothers as protagonists. The life of three women in the Mexican countryside is related to the accident: a police mother who witnessed the drug trafficking process of her oldest son, a waitress who seeks her missing daughter and, after divorce, a woman of good family who travels from the city to the countryside. The argument of the three women's elections and challenges is divided into different passages. We go from one fact to another, building a mosaic.

The images of the arid deserts and the feeling of suffocating heat quickly suggest the terror hidden behind the slow summer tranquillity. Likewise, the indeterminate sounds that occupy the environment in each sequence quickly become a sign of gravity. Little by little, as with the house that is one of the main stages of the film, it will flood us and fill everything with snakes.

It seemed to me to be a clear reflection on the treatment of the systemic – almost genealogical – violence exercised by the film and, above all, on the possibility of overcoming it. Having said that, I do not believe that the film reaches the right melody to address an interesting subject. The sensations that the viewer receives from one passage to another are very different, so the justification of some of the options that influence the development of the plot seems insufficient and the sense of many situations is lost. Although it's been a long time since the film ended, I'm still discovering what the motivation of the woman carrying the weight of the argument thread is. Perhaps the 40-year-old crisis will come to satisfy its complex savior and, for a while, play the games of the poor.

I would say that visually it falls into several clichés. For example, as in some of the performances of the Festival this year, in this one we have also been able to observe the formula that is repeated in recent times: the long plans that leave us looking at the neck of the characters. Leponados, leponados and leponados. With repetition, the image has lost the ability to be exciting. The film also exhausts the combination of the first sensitive drawings of the gloomy landscapes and the faces of the main characters.

After all, Manto de gemas has seemed to me to be a layer of precious stones, a creation that does not adequately fulfill the mission that is its own and that is very close to the risk of falling on the edge.