10 tips for the Film Festival ('Joker' not included)

• Billboard: 2019 Film Festival: tickets at € 2.90 on October 28, 29 and 30

Discarded Joker , whose essential film is about to become a brother- in- law film (as a thrashing conversation topic is about to match Brexit or the process ), all others remain. The film festival is a good opportunity to venture in less obvious, but more interesting ways: in the end the views are much more spectacular . The following is a list of 10 proposals.

'Parasites', by Bong Joon-ho.

For fine class resentment analysts. So with the Palme d'Or in Cannes despite Almodóvar, the Korean director proposes the closest thing to a stone. But so accurate that snatches. Actually, Bong Joon-ho is limited to putting in line a good part of the obsessions that haunt him since, in 2000, he released Barking Dog, little biting . Again, it is the impossibility of communication that guides a comedy with the black soul. Again, society divided into two sides not only antagonistic but doomed to exploitation, humiliation and fear. And, how could it be missing, this strange obsession with sewers, tunnels and hidden lives. The film tells the story of two identical families. Of course, one lives in a building of the most neat design and the other, in a basement sunk in the most murky hole. And so on until everything gets confused and something (we won't say what) makes a sinister fable the most terrifying of the stories about identity. The result is a nightmare so wise and close that it stings as much as it has fun. Surprising the mastery of a staging always on the verge of credibility , always in the exact place where tragedy stumbles upon comedy; and excites the ease to hurt. We thought it was capitalism and it was just the Apocalypse. Amen.

'O que arde', by Oliver Laxe.

For fire lovers in the widest and metaphorical of the senses. Spanish cinema has here one of its best films in years. Believe me. "If they make him suffer, it is because they suffer," Benedicta says. Benedicta is an octogenarian who receives his son Amador who comes out of jail with an assertive: "You will be hungry." Without dramatism, as if time had not passed, as if she did not live buried by the years of condemnation, one on top of the other, for having set the forest on fire. That is what the courts say. Amador is what the press calls with the arsonist name of arsonist. He, in his own way, drags all the blame of a time and a life that disappears. The causes of fires are many. Almost as many as the guilt. But he, in his silence not exactly compassionate, not angry, owns them all. They humiliate him, because they may live humiliated. Around these two characters, the Galician director composes an elegiac, almost apocalyptic portrait , "a dry melodrama", as he likes to say, about the power of purification of the llamas. The flames end everything in the same way that they announce the need for a completely new time. His saving virtue coincides exactly with his capacity for condemnation. The same fire that mortifies sinners enlightens cigars. And so. A masterpiece, no doubt.

'Portrait of a woman on fire', by Céline Sciamma.

For love lovers. "Love is a joy accompanied by the idea of ​​an external cause," said Spinoza parco. And Sciamma believes him and this is demonstrated in the truthful and faithful description of the passion that is this movie. All of it is lived as the uncertain spectacle of disassembly a bomb. If something fails, forget about the injured. A painter arrives at an 18th-century manor house with the task of making the wedding portrait of a former novice. What follows is both a prescribed study of the creation process and of the very meaning of the contemplated film. What do we see when we look at a portrait: the passion of the one who drew it or the soul of the one who lent itself to acting as a model? Which of the two looks matters most? It is these questions that, as signs on a forest path, leave the filmmaker so that it is the spectator who picks them up and makes them his own. And this from the hand of a transparent staging not exempt from illuminated moments as delicately surreal as they are lit. Passions are not vices are possibilities that open to life itself. This is also from Spinoza.

'Paradise hills' by Alice Waddington.

For intrepid adventurers. The film starts with a lavish and above all ambitious scene. It is a dance in a strange castle perhaps of the future. The protagonist (Emma Roberts) submits to the dictates of parents, family and relatives and agrees to marry the ideal young man. Then, everything jumps back. Now we are in a place of decoration between surreal and abstract that it is impossible to leave if it is not re-educated by a Milla Jovovich, which overwhelms the very stepmother of Snow White. We are facing a fairy tale, but also before a structured spiral intrigue very close to terror where the spectator discovers at the same time that the protagonists of what this dream is about by strange force, perhaps ridiculous, that so much resembles a nightmare. The staging wants to be forced, bulky, baroque and even naive. And indeed, everything runs on the screen like a sleepwalking narrative that also refers to a horror story than a story of secrets and adolescents more typical of Richard Donner. What does surprise, and for good, is that final turn so close to the apocalyptic cinema of the 50s . If so. The result is a film full of doubts, but so convinced of itself (and here both mistakes and successes come in) that there is nothing left but to give up. That is, the perfect debutante manual. Ambitious, enthusiastic, disembodied, different, provocative and even inalienable. And feminist. Very feminist.

'Until forever, my son', by Wang Xiaoshuai.

For researchers on the bitter side of history. The film traces three decades of the recent history of China. It does, of course, from the perspective of parents constrained by the State to have a child. Only one. And it does so in the hands of a virtuous puzzle in which the past, the present and an uncertain future are composed and decomposed with dazzling precision. It is basically a melodrama so aware of its forces and its mystery that boasts classicism in each of its frames. The film opens with an open plane in which a fatal accident is guessed. In a river, a group of adults run to rescue a child. Too late. Another kid, his friend, cries. The memory of this image will preside every second of the three hours of 'See you forever, my son'. What remains is the pain of parents who fight to understand not so much the inexplicable death of their child, but also, as the meaning of everything around them. They are a couple so perfectly strange to everything, so hurt, so sick of each of their mistakes that they would say Titans. And Wang Xiaoshuai treats them that way, convinced that every look, every minimal gesture, matters . The result is such an orthodox work, so calculated and precise, that it would be said an furiously iconoclastic exercise of formal and balanced cigar.

'Amazing Grace' by Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack.

Only for your ears. There is something in this documentary signed by Alan Elliott and filmed by Sydney Pollack in January 1972 that makes it not only unique but indescribably unique. Ineffable. The 11 minutes in which Aretha Franklin defies standing up to the very law of gravity while singing Amazing Grace precisely craves the best definition, by rigorously emotional, of the transcendent. As the song progresses, the chorus disarms, the audience loses their sense of modesty and the great Reverend Cleveland starts crying as a man probably never did before. And it is not so much exaggeration, but also, as grace . Full grace.

'Marta's Journey', by Neús Ballús.

For explorers of other worlds as strange as adolescence. The director who surprised La Plaga a long time ago now tells the vacations of a Spanish family in Senegal. There, the main character embodied by the debutant Elena Andrada will attend the last days of her adolescence accompanied by her father, Sergi López, and her brother. And it will do it at the same time that the world, its world as it has known it until then, is faced with the limits of another world by force too far. It is about talking about the lack of communication, about the equinoctial adventure of a necessarily strange being; from that and the desperate need to build spaces of understanding, understanding or simple tolerance with what is neither understood nor understood nor tolerated . The result is an emotional film that talks about reconciliation, that of a daughter with her father, that of a strange universe with its own strangeness. And he does it with a clarity, beauty and sense of humor that disarms.

'Behave as adults', by Costa-Gavras.

For policy failures. The film tells the most vertiginous and difficult days of the Hellenic state: the crisis of 2015 in which the country of southern Europe was about to stay out of, indeed, Europe. From the outset, it should be clear that the version offered is that of the defeated finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and that the whole film revolves around the question still unanswered about why Alexis Tsipras, president of lefts in the Government, decided to accept the conditions of the Troika and ignore the result of the referendum he called. Let's say the puzzle is still standing. The film works as the most refined lesson in history or, better, in the history of doors inside that strange institution of glass buildings and mahogany tables in which Europe has become. Suddenly, the characters of the news, always so formal, appear drawn as human beings consumed by all that consumes us: ambition, fear of ridicule, power and even ideals.

'El crack cero', by José Luis Garci.

Germán Areta is José Luis Garci. And backwards. Yes, there are differences, but only formal. Beyond the talkative desire of one against the mutism of the other, both can be dry martini, mus among friends, beauty without adjectives, the night soaked in neon and goodness understood as an exercise in dignity. Analog people. One is more boxing and the other is enough football. Sounds epic, maybe somewhat cheesy, and, indeed, that is what it is; of rescuing the value of immortal affairs by force. Nostalgia with open eyes. The zero crack tells what happened just before everything. Prequel call him. Suddenly, in an exhibition halfway between melancholy, mastery and the re-reading of postmodern aroma (for rigorously old), what emerges is a prodigy that recovers the perfect taste and sound of that first 1981 film, of that First onomatopoeia 'El crack', any of them, speaks of a time without time between a gray past and a future that is not so hopeful as it is simply different. The zero crack speaks of a man who prefers to shut up and a city that rediscovers a new soul. Crack is basically transition (or Transition), in every way imaginable. And it still is. Right from the start. From Areta From Garci.

'While the war lasts', by Alejandro Amenábar.

If there is still one left who has not seen it, it is time. And understand what is "the moment" in the most rigorous sense possible. Few films so accurate in describing what happened then and still happening now. From Franco to Franco ... We have no choice, which the poet said.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• movie theater
• Film Festival
• culture

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