Cannes: "La Bola Negra (The Black Ball)"

by Elisa Giudici

The cast of LA BOLA NEGRA

By now, the Los Javis hardly need introduction at Cannes. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who just tied Pawel Pawlikowski to win Best Director at the Cannes closing ceremony, have spent the last decade becoming not just successful filmmakers and showrunners, but cultural architects for a new generation of Spanish storytelling: proudly queer, emotionally maximalist, deeply rooted in national history while fully conversant in pop melodrama and contemporary television language. If Veneno made them unavoidable and La Mesías confirmed their creative ambition, La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) arrives as the film where they attempt to canonize themselves.

The scale alone announces the shift. Produced under the banner of El Deseo (the Almodóvar brothers’ company, also in Competition this year with Pedro’s latest) La Bola Negra carries the unmistakable aura of succession mythology around it. Not a rejection of the Almodóvar lineage so much as a generational mutation of it...

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Cannes at Home: Masturbation, Motherhood and Melodrama

by Cláudio Alves

Long before he was selected for the Cannes Main Competition, Rodrigo Sorogoyen became an Oscar nominee with his MOTHER short film.

The race for the Palme is heating up… is what you’d assume we’d be saying by the time half the Main Competition had screened. However, this year isn’t like most years at Cannes. Or maybe, it’s an edition where issues that have prevailed for years are finally becoming too noticeable to politely ignore. Thierry Frémaux’s favorite auteurs aren’t bringing it, and most of the biggest critical darlings are showing in parallel sections – think La Gradiva, Kurosawa’s first jidaigeki, Clarissa’s transposition of Mrs. Dalloway to Nigeria and various others. Indeed, Hirokazu Koreeda is receiving the worst reviews of his illustrious career for Sheep in the Box, while Rodrigo Sorogoyen can’t stop drawing depreciative Sentimental Value comparisons because of his The Beloved. Finally, James Gray’s Paper Tiger is proving divisive, which is business as usual for the American auteur.

With those cineastes in mind, let’s revisit Koreeda’s Air Doll about a sex doll magically come to life, Sorogoyen’s agonizing Mother, and one of Gray’s best films, the fraternal melodrama We Own the Night…

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TIFF 50: Between Spain and the Sahara in "Nomad Shadow," "Sirât" and "Calle Málaga"

by Cláudio Alves

Histories of colonialism were omnipresent at TIFF, even in films that, at first glance, might not seem to be in dialogue with these imperial pasts and legacies. Consider the matter of Spanish occupation in North Africa, how it has influenced tensions in the region long after the purported triumph of decolonial movements and still lives, haunting-like, in the contested partition of the Western Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania. Sometimes, it's something as simple as the children of colonial rule living in a limbo of their ancestors' making, caught in cultural intersections that feel bound to unravel any day now. 

In his feature debut, Nomad Shadow, Eimi Imanishi touches on some of these realities through the story of a Sahrawi woman deported from Spain, while Oliver Laxe's Sirât dances entranced across a minefield on the disputed desert. Finally, Maryam Touzani sings a song of displacement in Calle Málaga, where Carmen Maura – the original Chica Almodóvar! – must abandon the life she's always known in Tangiers after her daughter arrives from Madrid with terrible news. These latter two are their countries' submissions for the 98th Academy Awards, with Sirât representing Spain and Calle Málaga Morocco…

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TIFF 50: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias wins the FIPRESCI Prize for "Forastera"

by Cláudio Alves

Light has character. In Lucía Aleñar Iglesias's feature debut, Forastera, it also has a soul, manifesting spirits intangible and far away. Through variable brightness and mysterious movements, it bridges times and places, the here and there, our commonplace existence and something that might not be the beyond but is closer to such abstractions than to matters of the flesh. You can feel it in your bones, even before a sage old woman looks at a flickering light and describes its inconsistency as proof of ghosts roaming around the house. It's right there, at the film's start, when Iglesias sets her camera on two sisters sunbathing during their Mallorcan vacation.

The eldest shares the tall tale of a dolphin sighting, daring the other girl to doubt her. As they talk, clouds pass over and the temperature of the tableau shifts from warmth to cold grey and back again. They flicker like the faint impression of a candle flame, a picture of serenity volatized. More than just its subject, the frame itself feels animated by an impossible life…

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Intl' Oscar Updates: Bulgaria, Chile, Palestine, Philippines, Spain

by Nathaniel R

Multiple but brief International Oscar updates for you this fine Monday morning. We'd previously discussed the possibilities from Switzerland and three finalists from Czech Republic. Both countries have now made their decisions. Switzerland is going with The Late Shift, a hospital drama starring Leonie Benesch (September 5, Babylon Berlin). Czech Republic refused the recommendation from their Academy (which was trying to steer their votes to a different film) and went with the experimental documentary I'm Not Everything I Want To Be by Klára Tasovská which focuses on a photographer that's considered the 'Czech Nan Goldin.'

But that's not all...

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