Filmin will once again be the main online venue of the D’A Film Festival Barcelona, where its new Filmin Emergents section will offer a selection of great titles in a competition that can be seen exclusively on this platform. One of them is the new film by young Sol Berruezo Pichon-Rivière, who returns to the D’A after premiering Mamá, mamá, mamá. With Nuestros días más felices we enter the weird world of a filmmaker who is the audiovisual heir to some of the great names of Argentine literature, where a mother in her seventies wakes up one morning inside the body of a young girl. From the magical realism of the suburbs, we move on to the luminously summery urban realism of Álbum para la juventud, by another returnee to the D’A, Malena Solarz, here with her debut solo feature film, one that feels like a series of vivid snippets that are awash with the youthful energy of a transcendental summer.
And from Buenos Aires to Paris, Ma nuit is the nocturnal journey of a damaged teenager who, in her trance through the Parisian night, will run into a series of peculiar characters who will reconcile her —or not— with the world. In stark contrast, I Comete: A Corsican Summer, by Pascal Tagnati, takes us, with captivating naturalness, to observe the everyday summer life of a small town in Corsica and the eccentricities of the people who live there. English language cinema has two strong representatives in The Justice of Bunny King from New Zealand and The Sleeping Negro from the United States, two cases of angry, incisive social auteur cinema. The former portrays a mother’s struggle to regain custody of her children, and the latter is a cinematographic essay with hints of surrealism in which racism is examined from less obvious angles, with plenty of unusually poetic gags.
Just as suggestive is the science fiction story by Carlos Amaral. The visual effects expert has had a go at directing and the result is Mar infinito, an atmospheric, dystopian film that speaks of loneliness and hope on a terminal Earth. And finally, it’s summer once again in a film that takes us back to Kiarostami’s childhood tales. Time of Impatience feels like an adventure involving two friends going to swim in a pool, but it is much more than that. It’s a film that describes inequalities and realisation from the perspective of two Kurdish.
