Some of the film selectors of the D’A 2018 have chosen their favourite films pointing out some useful notes that may help you to choose between the different films of the festival or just want to follow their advice.
Carlos Losilla recommends Mrs. Hyde
I love Serge Bozon’s cinema. I think he is as important in the French cinema as Bertrand Bonello or Arnaud Desplechin. I love La France and Tip Top. And I think that Mrs. Hyde is one of the movies of the season, a crazed adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde with an Isabelle Huppert in a humorous-burlesque state of grace. An outrageous comedy and a drama of philosophical terror, both packaged in a free and a sophisticated style: all that and more in one movie.
Óskar Fernandez recommends En attendant les hirondelles
Maybe it’s not one of my favourites but the story contained in En Attendant les hirondelles, is the one that touched me more. In it, a boy takes a neighbour to his daughter’s wedding. On the car trip, we will discover that there is a special bond between the companion and the neighbour’s daughter, until due to bizarre circumstances, both have to spend the day and the night together. That parenthesis in his life, fulled with a magical and touching realism, will allow them to be themselves for the first and last time. An hour and a half of cinema in its purest form. Do not miss it.
Eulàlia Iglesias recommends Arábia
With the tone of a western ballad, the first feature film by Affonso Uchoa and João Dumans unfolds like a structured road movie based on the precarious work of the protagonist. Cristiano roams the country of work in work accumulating experiences that will be reflected in his diary. The hardness of the working and vital conditions of the characters is compensated by the warm humanity of the words of Cristiano, who evokes them through his writings. One more sample of the power of emerging Brazilian cinema, Arábia makes it clear that another political cinema is possible.
Emilio Luna recommends Lean on Pete
Lean on Pete goes away from the stereotypes, from the most anodyne sentimentality, to catch, with closeness and humanity, the relationship between two helpless beings, thrown adrift. An anti-western that moves thanks to an elegant and melancholic narrative about that past that we never live, but we will always long for.
Xavi Arnaiz recommends El león duerme esta noche
Nobuhiro Suwa signs a moving film about the absence, with Jean-Pierre Léaud in the skin of an actor unable to interpret the death of his character, and who will meet a group of children filming a horror movie in the now abandoned house where he lived the love of his life. With these elements, Suwa weaves a metacinematographic work, expansive, refined and of a really complex simplicity, where reality merges with memory, and where fiction serves as a catalyst for an eminently phantasmagoric story – and with some common ground, for true, with the splendid Personal Shopper. It will be difficult for us to get a better film this year than El león duerme esta noche, an (anti) twilight work full of light.
Diana Santamaria recommends As duas Irenes
As duas Irenes, the first film by Fabio Meira, is a luminous film that returns summer to our lips: that long and confused summer of early adolescence. Two protagonists, two sides of the same coin, who play hide and seek in front of a hostile family environment and carca. A fresh, sensitive film that questions, without interdiction, what it means to grow up… With first kiss included.
Sílvia Grumaches recommends Ava
The cinema debut of director Sadaf Foroughi, an Iranian who lives in Canada, may seem to start dragging thematic-aesthetic topics of Iranian cinema, with the long shadow of Abbas Kiarostami projected on all filmmakers emerged from that country. But here Sadaf Foroughi takes the right and necessary distance to speak without prejudice about what it is like to be an adolescent and have to fight against two repressive forces, those of your country and those that your own family has internalized. All this seasoned with the doubts and rebelliousness of age. Like the Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis, the protagonist Ava’s gaze challenges us directly and freely.
