Otros Cines Europa
La Casa Encendida opens the family albums of contemporary cinema
January 16, 2022
http://www.otroscineseuropa.com/la-casa-encendida-abre-los-albumes-de-familia-del-cine-contemporaneo/
Rough Translation from Spanish:
Throughout the month of February, the Madrid cultural center presents a cycle in which the filmmakers themselves and their families are the protagonists of the films.
The permanent program of contemporary cinema at La Casa Encendida (Madrid) will focus, throughout the month of February, on family film albums. Thus, the films in the Family Album cycle “explore the domestic memory of their protagonists, delving into the space of everyday life, either from the present or resorting to archives from the past, materials, the latter, which were initially conceived for their intimate enjoyment, but now they are resignified, transforming those memories of family life into images that appeal to the collective”.
In the series, two filmmakers, Lynne Sachs in Film About a Father Who and Mercedes Gaviria in Like the Sky After It Rained , study their relationships with their respective fathers, both men with powerful and absorbing personalities. For her part, in Esquirlas , Natalia Garayalde reconstructs a tragic event that occurred 25 years ago, based on videos she recorded as a child; and Aitor Merino portrays his family in Fantasia, a reflection on the passage of time that converts, precisely, that lived time into cinematographic time. Four films in which, as in any family album, the images collected in them will survive the bodies. The cycle of La Casa Encendida is made with the collaboration of Enrique Piñuel.
Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 February: Fantasy , by Aitor Merino (Spain, 2021).The cruise ship, one of the (not) most fictional places in reality, where time is suspended in a kind of dreamlike limbo and which in this case, as if that were not enough, bears the name of Fantasy, becomes a machine of the time in which the brothers Aitor and Amaia, who are close to turning fifty, are once again the children of parents who, due to their age, should be grandparents. This scenario serves to begin to unfold a choreography of family life, which already in the daily life of the home makes present the reality of the passage of time, reflecting on life as a couple, relationships, memory, old age, the future and the fear of absence A portrait as tender as it is rigorous, of a family that also serves Aitor Merino (director of Asier ETA biok) to establish a genealogy of their ancestors, transcending the domestic to become universal.
Saturday, February 12 and Sunday, February 13 : Like the sky after it rained , by Mercedes Gaviria (Colombia, 2020) . Mercedes Gaviria returns to her hometown, Medellín, to work on the filming of La mujer del animal, the last film by his father, the legendary Colombian filmmaker Víctor Gaviria, a director who for years, between shooting and shooting, spent his domestic life filming his family, now providing an immense archive to work on. The coexistence of these two generations of filmmakers provides an intimate look at family relationships, presences and absences, memories and silences that reflect the contradictions of every family. Throughout the film, the distance between father and daughter is evident in several situations, although the shared passion for cinema is above all else.
Saturday, February 19 and Sunday, February 20 : Esquirlas , by Natalia Garayalde (Argentina, 2020). On November 3, 1995, the military factory in Río Tercero, a town in Córdoba where the Garayalde family lived, exploded, causing thousands of projectiles to be fired, leaving behind seven dead and dozens injured and homeless. Natalia and her sister, from the innocence of childhood, recorded the moments after the explosion, as well as the daily life of the town, marked by the tragedy, in the following days. Over time, what was presumed to be an accident was uncovered as one of the most terrifying events in recent Argentine history, with the illegal sale of weapons destined for the Balkan war by the government of Carlos Menem and state terrorism. to hide evidence. 25 years later, the director reappropriates her own material to resignify it,
Saturday, February 26 and Sunday, February 27: Film About a Father Who , by Lynne Sachs (United States, 2020).A kaleidoscopic portrait filmed, between 1984 and 2019, in multiple formats, Super 8, 16mm, VHS, HD, in which Lynne Sachs delves into the controversial figure of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant from Utah, Extravagant in appearance, an entrepreneur in the hotel industry, manipulative, selfish and charismatic seducer, he led a life full of secrets, had nine children (among them is also the filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr.) with five women, some of whom remained hidden. for the rest of the family for years. The film reflects on the life of this man and how his decisions affected the entire family, and is also a suggestive study of the passage of time both in form and substance.